FACEBOOK Bans Articles Exposing Hoax…

BY TYLER O’NEIL FEBRUARY 18, 2019

**Over the weekend, Facebook prevented people from sharing two conservative articles on the unraveling case of Empire star Jussie Smollett, which seems to be a hate hoax. Both Rod Dreher, author of** The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, and Daily Caller reporter Jen Kerns saw their articles censored on Facebook.

“You are not allowed to say on Facebook that Jussie Smollett carried out a hate hoax,” Dreher tweeted on Sunday with a screenshot of Facebook blocking his article at The American Conservative.

According to the screenshot, Facebook blocked the article because it appeared to be “spam” and said the post “goes against our Community Standards.”

Facebook lifted the ban later on Sunday.

On Saturday, lawyer Harmeet K. Dillon shared the news that Jen Kerns’s article had been blocked, also allegedly for “violating community standards.”

Rudy Takala also reported that Jen Kerns had been banned on Instagram.

Jen Kerns shared screenshots of the ban with PJ Media. Kerns told PJ Media that Facebook would not allow her to post the article as early as Friday.

Then when she tried to put the article in her Instagram bio, Instagram booted her from the account until she removed the link.

Rod Dreher’s article merely shared the previous reporting on the case, with a few paragraphs of his opinion sprinkled in. Jen Kerns compared the Jussie Smollett apparent hoax with the 1980s hoax perpetrated by Tawana Brawley.

In a follow-up article about the Facebook ban, Rod Dreher attempted to make sense of Facebook’s decision.

I fully support Facebook or any other social medium having a policy of banning certain material (porn, neo-Nazi propaganda, etc.). But when you can’t talk about hate hoaxes in general, or about a celebrated hate hoax in particular? Presumably my blog post violated Facebook’s “hate speech” prohibition (I can’t find any of their other Community Standards that it might have violated). Facebook’s policy on “hate speech” is here.This, I suppose, is what my blog post violated:

But the entire reason for the post is new evidence indicating that Jussie Smollett was NOT a victim of a hate crime, but rather faked a hate crime!

The move indeed seems rather head-scratching.

Facebook also censored a pair of conservative articles last August as news broke surrounding the Paul Manafort conviction and the Michael Cohen guilty plea. Both articles countered the prevailing liberal narrative about these events.

It seems these bouts of censorship are likely caused by liberal Facebook users marking articles as “spam.” The social media company later removed the blocks, but censoring articles in the hours after their publication does a serious disservice in the news industry, where fresh information has the most pertinent impact.

Even if Facebook is not behind the initial decision to block, the company should make sure the posts are “spam” before blocking them, rather than allowing some Social Justice Warrior to silence news on the internet.

February 19, 2019 0

Facebook blocks pages with MILLIONS of subscribers after CNN reports ties with RT

Facebook has suspended several accounts operated by Maffick Media without prior warning, right after CNN ran a report about the company’s perceived ties to the Kremlin.

In what seems to be a new step in the social media giant’s fight against perceived ‘Russian propaganda’, Facebook took down, without prior notice, several pages offering video content. The social media network said it would ask the administrators of Soapbox, Back Then and Waste-Ed to disclose their “Russian affiliations.” Facebook also suspended another Maffick page, In the Now, which was originally a show aired by RT.

“People connecting with Pages shouldn’t be misled about who’s behind them. Just as we’ve stepped up our enforcement of coordinated inauthentic behavior and financially motivated spam over the past year, we’ll continue improving so people can get more information about the Pages they follow,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

However, no official requests were filed with Maffick Media, the German-based company operating all three pages. They were not notified before the fact, which prompted an angry response (posted on Maffick’s front page at the time of writing) in which they branded Facebook policies “new McCarthyism.” All three pages remained offline on Monday.

The accounts were suspended shortly after CNN aired a report with the catchy headline “Kremlin funds viral videos aimed at millennials,” in which it listed all three pages as part of the Kremlin’s “influence campaign” targeting unsuspecting young American adults. CNN stated that German-based Maffick Media is “mostly owned” by Ruptly video news agency – a subsidiary of RT – and is thus in the Kremlin’s back pocket.

An open secret

CNN also repeatedly accused Maffick of concealing its suspected ties to Russia to mislead its audience. While, indeed, none of the pages bore a glowing stamp that said “paid for by the Kremlin,” they were never told that they were required to do so. Besides, no special effort was made to hide the funding sources – as proved by the CNN reporters themselves, who used an online commercial registers database to acquire documents showing that Maffick is 51 percent (which CNN generalized as “mostly”) owned by Ruptly.

The remaining near-half belongs to Maffick CEO Anissa Naouai, an American journalist of Tunisian descent. Before launching her independent project, Naouai founded the show In The Now, which was aired by RT International (and whose Facebook page was also suspended), and before that, worked as a reporter and presenter for RT. She says the company only fully employs people in Berlin and hires Americans as freelancers. Notably, In The Now had over 2.5 billion views on Facebook.

Incidentally, CNN’s own report was based on a tip from the German Marshall Fund, financed by the US, German, and other governments. Among the Fund’s other accomplishments is the questionable Hamilton 68 ‘Russian propaganda tracker’ – a website that labels Twitter accounts as ‘Russian influence’ operations and tracks their activities based on an undisclosed methodology that is impossible to verify – but is still embraced by multiple US mainstream media outlets as a reliable tool.

Unexplained ban

Facebook’s decision to shut down the pages run by Maffick has gone unexplained so far. The company did not break any of the social media network’s rules, which as of now do not demand that anyone post funding details on their Facebook pages. On top of that, numerous other media companies supported with government money – including NPR, PBS, BBC, DW, CBC, and AJ+ – never had to deal with similar treatment, Maffick notes.

Maffick was singled out for the sole reason that Russia is the supporting government, the company says.

Maffick Media says it is editorially independent – but, as per the CNN report, “much of [its] content seemed to be perfectly aligned with much of the propaganda coming out of the Kremlin” – that is to say, the content does not align with the mainstream view of American policies.

If I oppose a US war, does that automatically mean I am going to be accused of being aligned with the Kremlin? With this Russia hysteria we are experiencing now I feel like this is a very, very dangerous McCarthyist tactic to start saying that leftist views, anti-war views are just the Kremlin government’s talking points.

This is what Rania Khalek, the American host of Soapbox – one of the video shows Maffick ran on Facebook – told CNN when asked about her alleged connections to Moscow.

Each of the suspended pages had tens of thousands of followers on Facebook, while their videos were viewed “tens of millions of times,” according to CNN – a level of popularity which possibly spurred Facebook to take such drastic and swift measures to silence them.

February 18, 2019 0

THE RASHIDA TLAIB’S LOUIS FARRAKHAN CONNECTION

By Peter Hasson

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote a column for Nation of Islam publication Final Call in 2006.
Final Call was founded by Louis Farrakhan and is “the official communications organ of the Nation of Islam.”
Farrakhan is a notorious anti-Semite who has described Jews as “satanic” and praised Hitler as a “very great man.”
Tlaib has already faced scrutiny over other ties to anti-Semitism.

Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib in 2006 wrote an op-ed column for Final Call, a Nation of Islam publication founded by Louis Farrakhan, in the latest tie to emerge between the congresswoman and anti-Semitic figures.

Tlaib authored the column in 2006, while working as the advocacy coordinator for the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), two years before she first won election to the state legislature. Tlaib was described as a “guest columnist” in the article, which argued against deporting immigrants found guilty of “minor offenses.”

Final Call describes itself as “the official communications organ of the Nation of Islam” and was founded by the group’s leader, Farrakhan, according to Final Call’s website.

Farrakhan’s history of unapologetic anti-Semitism including describing Jews as “satanic” and praising Hitler as a “very great man,” was well established by 2006.

Final Call has published a steady stream of articles defending Farrakhan from charges of anti-Semitism.

An October 2018 Final Call article quoted Farrakhan’s social media director, Jesse Muhammad, saying the backlash was proof that Farrakhan “must have sprayed some form of termite repellant that stirred up those that have practiced and continue to practice Talmudic ways by eating at the foundation and the carcass of a dead people chosen by God.”

Tlaib’s office did not immediately return a request for comment. Conservative writer Jeryl Bier on Monday first noted Tlaib’s Final Call oped.

Tlaib has already come under fire for her ties to other anti-Israel radicals, as well as her support for the anti-Israel Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, which has often overlapped with anti-Semitic causes.

A key fundraiser for Tlaib’s 2018 congressional campaign, Abdel-qader Maher, repeatedly promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook, both on his own page and within a Facebook group that includes Tlaib.

Abdel-qader took credit on Facebook for organizing fundraisers for Tlaib among Arab-Americans, pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars for her campaign. Photos he’s posted on social media show him speaking at Tlaib campaign events.

Tlaib also came under fire after posing for a picture with Palestinian activist Abbas Hamideh, a supporter of Hezbollah who believes Israel shouldn’t exist, at her swearing-in ceremony.

Tlaib claimed she didn’t know him, though she had previously posted a picture with him on Facebook. (RELATED: Maxine Waters Attended Nation of Islam Convention Where Farrakhan Defended Suicide Bombers)

Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour was an early supporter of Tlaib, who has continued to support Sarsour’s organization, despite its own anti-Semitism issues. Sarsour and another co-chair, Tamika Mallory, have faced scrutiny over their support of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

Sarsour was unapologetic about the Farrakhan controversy less than two weeks ago, in a taped podcast with left-wing media outlet Democracy Now.

Sarsour lashed out at critics of her support for Farrakhan, and called for “accountability” within “our communities” because “we made Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour and Minister Farrakhan literally the whole story instead of focusing on the real threats to our communities, which is white nationalism.”

Sarsour then suggested that Jewish people had mishandled the controversy, and urged them to have “hard conversations” in order to avoid “imposing [their] trauma” on others:

So, what I’m, we have been asked and demanded of many things. And we have came out and said we understand and we hear the pain. And I understand. I’ve been working with Jews for over 20 years. I understand historical trauma. And a lot of this comes from historical, the reasons why people backlash is because they respond from a place of trauma. Black people have historical trauma. Lots of people have historical trauma. But we have to sometimes go back to our communities and say, “Let’s heal. Let’s find ways to deal with this trauma so that we’re not imposing our trauma on others who are also traumatized, and focusing on the people that are causing the trauma to our communities.”

February 11, 2019 0

YouTube ADMITS They Manipulate Your Suggested Videos

James Allsup

Premiered 3 hours ago

January 30, 2019 0

‘Largest scam in history’: HALF of Facebook accounts fake, says Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmate

As many as half of Facebook‘s two billion accounts are fake or duplicates, according to a new report from a former classmate of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He has highlighted how the fakes defraud users, advertisers and investors alike.

Rocked by a major privacy scandal last year, Facebook has been trying to create an image of a company with high community standards, striving to curb the illicit behavior of users. But the company may be deliberately understating the amount of fake accounts, a new report says.

The firm’s own quarterly investment reports reveal that the its much-vaunted account base, which is supposedly has over 2 billion monthly active users, is packed with fake accounts communicating with just enough randomness to trick the social network’s algorithms, according to Zuckerberg’s former classmate at Harvard, Aaron Greenspan.

Greenspan claimed that he had originally come up with the idea for Facebook and worked on the future network, before Zuckerberg eventually founded the company. That claim was the basis of the trademark dispute between Facebook and Greenspan’s company, Think Computer Corporation, settled in 2009.

In a report, published by his legal data nonprofit PlainSite, Greenspan alleges that Facebook “has been lying to the public about the scale of its problem with fake accounts, which likely exceed 50 percent of its network.”

The fake accounts are particularly dangerous because they “often defraud other users on Facebook, through scams, fake news, extortion, and other forms of deception” and often “involve governments,” he writes.

He further accused the company of “selling” ads to “hundreds of millions of phantom buyers – users who do not actually exist.”

According to Greenspan, Facebook has attempted to obscure and downplay the actual number of fake accounts and their prevalence by employing “cleverly worded disclaimers” in its official reporting as well as dropping “many” of the important metrics from quarterly reports altogether.

In his report, citing the social network’s own estimates, Greenspan concludes that since the end of 2017 Facebook has deleted at least 2.8 billion fake accounts, which is more that the amount of its monthly active users and more than a half of “all accounts ever created.”

Facebook outright denied Greenspan’s claims. “This report is completely wrong and not based on any facts or research,”the company told RT, adding that Facebook files its fake account estimates with the Securities and Exchange Commission every quarter. “This is unequivocally wrong and responsible reporting means reporting facts, even if it’s about fake accounts,” the statement continued.

Still, an entire industry has sprung up to supply convincingly “aged” fake Facebook accounts, often bundled by the hundred and boasting less than 1 percent detection rate.

Facebook attracts advertisers by flaunting the access to its billion-plus users, sorted and categorized by a marketer’s dream of individual data. However, some reports claim that in reality a sizeable amount of traffic online is generated by ‘fake-clicking’ done by bots and humans working on specially-organized ‘click farms,’ as the company reached the market saturation or simply ‘ran out of humans.’

Small advertisers sued the social media giant last year, claiming it overstated the amount of time users spent watching videos by up to 900 percent. According to Marketing Land, the alleged fraud is far from an isolated event: Facebook misreported the reach of Facebook Page posts, the proportion of users who watch ad videos all the way through, the average time users spend reading “instant articles,” the number of referrals to external websites, and the number of mobile views, as claimed in the reports the outlet collected.

Facebook’s role in global ads is expected to grow. Digital publishing agency Polar estimated that the tech giant, together with Google and several other ‘digital goliaths’ like Amazon, will control 80 percent of all digital advertising in 2019.

In recent years, the social network had been entrenched in high-profile controversies over users’ data protection, privacy issues, and the spread of misinformation online. To make matters worse, Facebook’s market value has been slidingdownwards since July, when it lost almost $120 billion in a single day of trading – the largest-ever drop in company valuation in stock market history.

Following the Cambridge Analytica data-mining scandal, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook didn’t do enough to safeguard its users’ interests and apologized. In response to mounting criticism, he vowed to step up commitments to privacy protection.

In an effort to combat disinformation, the company experimented with its algorithms to detect ‘fake news’ and broughtthird-party fact-checkers on board for help.

ALSO ON RT.COMFacebook may face a record fine over privacy lapses – reports

In the first six months of 2018 alone Facebook said it removed around 1.5 billion fake accounts. Last year, the company also reported removing fake accounts linked to either Russia or Iran, and although the numbers were minute on the overall scale, measuring from under 100 to several hundred, the news received wide coverage.

Facebook’s model of operations “can feel opaque” and be hard to understand for outsiders, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an op-ed for Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

“Sometimes this means people assume we do things that we don’t do. For example, we don’t sell people’s data, even though it’s often reported that we do.”

The company’s CEO reiterated that the network has “strong incentive” to protect users’ data and selling off such information is against the company’s business interests.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

January 25, 2019 0

No need to install: Microsoft has controversial fake news filter NewsGuard built into mobile browser

Corporate and neocon-backed startup NewsGuard is one step closer to its vision of bringing its “unreliable” news rater to every screen after Microsoft makes it an integral part of its Edge mobile browser.

Rather than having to download an app as before, Edge users on Android and Apple devices can now just click one button to enable its “green-red rating signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”

Among the green-rated websites: Voice of America, CNN, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as left-leaning upstarts such as Vice News and Refinery 29. Ones that are given the red warning label of “failing to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability”: RT and Sputnik (obviously enough) and the right-wing Daily Mail, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, in addition to hundreds of other non-mainstream news websites such as Wikileaks.

Not only does the integration ensure that NewsGuard is present on every browser, and is easier to use than to ignore, but by making it a fundamental Microsoft-provided feature, the company gives it inherent level of trustworthiness, something akin to a bundled anti-virus feature, only this time the virus targets your brain, not your computer or iPod.

‘Totally transparent’

None of this is the slightest bit alarming if you believe that NewsGuard is an absolutely fair arbiter of what constitutes real news or propaganda.

Its pride of place is its “Nutrition Labels” which ape the precision of a list of calories, carbs, and saturated fats to give a supposedly scientific assessment of media reliability on nine different criteria. Among them: doesn’t repeatedly publish false content, avoids deceptive headlines, gathers and presents information responsibly, handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.

The green-listed media outlets above apparently do not ever engage in these practices, or at least not knowingly. So CNN never misleads with its headlines, the Guardian never dresses up its agendas as news, and Buzzfeed stories are always accurate. One literally doesn’t have to go back three days to find dozens of examples to the contrary, but this would be too mind-numbingly pedantic a task.

Even regular readers of the green-tick media must be able to see these are judgment calls. What is even “presenting information responsibly”?

Perhaps realizing that their pseudo-scientific fancy diagram is insufficient, NewsGuard has stressed that they are not using shadowy methods like tech companies and are open to two-way communication.

“We want people to game our system. We are totally transparent. We are not an algorithm,” company co-founder Steve Brill told the Guardian.

This is how he explained the Daily Mail red warning.

“We spell out fairly clearly in the label exactly how many times we have attempted to contact them. The analyst that wrote this writeup got someone on the phone who, as soon he heard who she was and where she was calling from, hung up. As of now, we would love to hear if they have a complaint or if they change anything.”

On the other hand, RT did answer NewsGuard’s queries in detail. You can guess how much difference that made.

From anthrax scares to Russia fears

But who are these people that the Daily Mail or RT have to impress and why?

Brill himself is a veteran centrist journalist and author, his co-CEO Gordon Crovitz is a former Wall Street Journal columnist. After Brill, its second-biggest investor, along with his father, is Nick Penniman, the liberal publisher, and the third-biggest is Publicis Group, a multinational advertising agency.

Meanwhile, its advisory board includes Tom Ridge, the first-ever Homeland Security chief, and developer of another famous color-coded system, the terror alert, and Michael Hayden, the CIA director, also under George W. Bush. There are also several Obama and Clinton-era figures.

The overall picture emerges of a mix of establishment journalists, hawkish old-school Washington insiders, and so-called ethical businessmen.

They may all be experts in their fields, but if you believe that these are selfless neutral adjudicators you are probably beyond being helped by color charts. And this is not some one-off initiative either: NewsGuard is part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program, which combats purported election meddling, presumably primarily from Russia. The frontline of the information war is not customarily the place for impartial news judgment.

But I wasn’t an Edge user…

However much respectability NewsGuard enjoys through Microsoft, Edge has a laughably small – a fraction of a percent – market share on mobiles. In practical terms, even an increase of popularity of several thousand percent will only mean several thousand new users, and other browsers are available.

This would be that, if not for newsGuard’s self-proclaimed ambition “to expand to serve the billions of people globally who get news online.” This is just a beginning: there is an overarching plan where all public computers, from the school to the university to the library, are automatically equipped with the same “safe browsing” system.

And rather than as an individual warning, NewsGuard plans to make its designations work as an effective financial tool. The company, which has received $6 million in backing, also plans to soon work with advertisers, “keeping ads off unreliable news websites” to ensure “brand safety.” Fall foul of the green ticks, no money for you. Advertising managers are already demonetizing programs with alternative or controversial viewpoints elsewhere, and soon the process can be automated, and Brill is boasting that he is “happy to be blamed” – doing the dirty work for the platforms. No wonder alternative outlets in the US are openly opposed.

So, just like the use of NewsGuard in all public libraries in the faraway state of Hawaii (no money charged), it is best to look at the Edge integration is more of a test, a pilot project, a dry run. Latching NewsGuard onto a popular browser like Chrome, or a social network like Facebook, would stir tremors of public debate, as it has done in the past when similar initiatives have been tried. Instead, first they came for the Edge users.

January 23, 2019 0

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA LECTURER SAYS “FIGHTING WHITE PEOPLE IS A SKILL”

“You have to get used to fighting white people”

Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com – JANUARY 17, 2019

**A philosophy lecturer at the University of Georgia was accused of advocating racial violence after he tweeted “fighting white people is a skill”.**

“Fighting White people is a skill. Really, it’s one reason I’m in support of integrated schools. You have to get used to fighting White people. It takes practice,” tweeted Irami Osei-Frimpong, who is listed on the official University of Georgia website under the Department of Philosophy.

Osei-Frimpong, who goes by the name ‘The Funky Academic’, also quoted Bobby E. Wright, a political activist who once said, “Blacks kill Blacks because they have never been trained to kill Whites.”

One respondent on Twitter accused of “advocating racial violence against whites”.

“It is interesting that you believe this. Black people in white neighborhoods tend assimilate with white people, and despise people who think like you,” commented another user.

It is unclear why Osei-Frimpong advocates “fighting white people,” but a review of his teaching style on the RateMyProfessors website reveals one student’s opinion that, “If you are sensitive to criticism of white people, you will not enjoy his lectures.”

Osei-Frimpong’s blog features writing in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, while one entry also discusses how he was suspended by Facebook for 30 days for a post in which he called for a “political revolution” and said he was a fan of “white people writing checks out of guilt.”

Osei-Frimpong’s Facebook page also reveals his support for Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

January 17, 2019 0

Over 770 million email addresses shared online in largest data breach in history

A security researcher has blown the lid off the largest data breach in history as over 770 million emails and 21 million unique passwords have been exposed, eclipsing the Equifax and Yahoo hacks by a significant margin.

The breach is being dubbed ‘Collection #1’ and contains a raw data set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows from potentially thousands of different sources, according to digital security expert Troy Hunt.

In terms of sheer volume, it is being considered the largest data breach in history, second only to Yahoo’s high profile cyber security gaffes which affected billions of users, though it is an aggregate of potentially hundreds if not thousands of breaches.

“It just looks like a completely random collection of sites purely to maximize the number of credentials available to hackers,” Hunt told WIRED. “There’s no obvious patterns, just maximum exposure.”

The breach contains previously encrypted passwords that have been “dehashed” or cracked and converted back to plain text and includes files allegedly from as early as 2008. The information wasn’t even for sale but was merely dumped on MEGA and subsequently on a popular hacking forum, free for anyone with scroll and click capabilities to review.

As a result, there is a greatly increased risk of so-called credential-stuffing attacks in which hackers spam websites with various combinations of emails and passwords, including – but not limited to – services like Netflix, Facebook or other social media accounts, and online services. The breach doesn’t appear to contain social security or credit card data.

Hunt recommends checking your email addresses on the free service provided by Have I Been Pwned.

If you are included in the breach, which is extremely likely, he recommends using a password manager or even going old school and employing *gasp* a pen and paper to store your passwords offline. Hack that!

“It might be contrary to traditional thinking, but writing unique passwords down in a book and keeping them inside your physically locked house is a damn sight better than reusing the same one all over the web,” Hunt wrote in his blog post on the breach.

A lucky few are claiming to have escaped the breach, but the odds are not in your favor.

Not in the new leak. 😎
Huge work @troyhunt 👍👨‍💻 pic.twitter.com/qA94CbvMJg

— SwitHak (@SwitHak) January 16, 2019

January 17, 2019 0

‘Land of censorship & home of the fake’ Facebook is getting into the local news business

Facebook is investing $300 million in local newsrooms and training initiatives for regional journalists over the next three years. But can Mark Zuckerberg be trusted to keep the press free?

With print newspapers’ advertising revenues in freefall for almost two decades, and local newspapers conglomerating and laying off staff to survive, the industry will take any help it can get. Facebook – with its mountains of fake news, clickbait, and a tricky environment for digital publishers to make money in – has in no small way contributed to the precarious state of modern journalism, but the company now wants to give the fourth estate a booster shot.

Russian security chief calls BBC ‘fake news factory that Britons themselves take with a smile’

The company decided to focus specifically on local news. Vice President of Global News Partnerships Campbell Brown said in a blog post that after examining what kind of news people want to see on Facebook, the company “heard one consistent answer: people want more local news, and local newsrooms are looking for more support.”

Facebook’s support for the new industry has thus far been limited to funding a small selection of news programs from CNN, Fox News, and a handful of others. The social media giant has been far more keen to play policeman, partnering up with an array of third-party “fact checkers”last year to filter out “false narratives” and “intentionally divisive headlines and language that exploit disagreements and sow conflict”from users’ timelines.

Troublingly, even Facebook’s own staff could not explain what exactly the term “false narratives” meant. Additionally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with a consortium of media executives shortly afterwards to talk about his company’s use of algorithms to promote ‘reputable news’ and suppress other content, all to ensure that “people can get trustworthy news on our platform.”

Drawn from CNN, the New York Times, Buzzfeed and others, the overwhelmingly liberal makeup of the panel of executives did little to persuade conservatives – who have long accused the platform of bias – that Facebook would act impartially.

Neither did Facebook’s announcement in August that it would partner up with the aggressively pro-NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council vowed to serve as Facebook’s “eyes and ears” in the fight against fake news, but that fight resulted in hundreds of alternative news pages being purged from the platform in October. The 800 pages spanned the political spectrum, and their removal triggered cries of censorship and accusations that Facebook was waging “a wider war on dissident narratives.”

One banned cartoonist declared Facebook to be “land of the censorship and home of the fake,” while anti-war journalist Caitlin Johnstone called the purge the “latest escalation of corporate censorship used as state censorship in the West.”

Can Facebook then be trusted to fund local journalism?

The answer is unclear. The $300 million will be given to a number of organizations to distribute further. Some of these organizations, like the Pulitzer Center, are household names. Others, like Report for America, are less well known. The Pulitzer Center will receive $5 million to award as grants to local newsrooms around the country, and social justice non-profit Report for America will get $2 million to go towards the hiring of 1,000 journalists over the next five years.

Pulitzer Center founder and executive director Jon Sawyer welcomed the funding, and took time to “applaud Facebook’s commitment to the editorial independence that is absolutely essential to our success.”

No matter how hands-off Facebook stays, some commentators were angered by the company’s new-found role as champion of the local press. After contributing in a large way to the decline of print media, Facebook’s $300 million investment in the industry is, as one cartoon implied, “peanuts.”

January 15, 2019 0

Microsoft Partners With Neocon-Backed ‘Fact Checker’ Seeking To ‘Wage War On Independent Media’

by Chris Menahan

Microsoft has partnered with a shoddy Neocon-backed “fact checker” called NewsGuard which rates websites’ “credibility” in-browser and NewsGuard’s CEO says their goal is to have their software on all smartphones and computers by default.

From MintPressNews:

How a NeoCon-Backed “Fact Checker” Plans to Wage War on Independent Media

As Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States.
by Whitney Webb
January 09th, 2019

Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.

While a few, relatively uneventful months in the online news sphere have come and gone since Fly made this ominous warning, it appears that the neoconservatives and other standard bearers of the military-industrial complex and the U.S. oligarchy are now poised to let loose their latest digital offensive against independent media outlets that seek to expose wrongdoing in both the private and public sectors.

As MintPress News Editor-in-Chief Mnar Muhawesh recently wrote, MintPress was informed that it was under review by an organization called Newsguard Technologies, which described itself to MintPress as simply a “news rating agency” and asked Muhawesh to comment on a series of allegations, several of which were blatantly untrue. However, further examination of this organization reveals that it is funded by and deeply connected to the U.S. government, neo-conservatives, and powerful monied interests, all of whom have been working overtime since the 2016 election to silence dissent to American forever-wars and corporate-led oligarchy.

More troubling still, Newsguard — by virtue of its deep connections to government and Silicon Valley — is lobbying to have its rankings of news sites installed by default on computers in U.S. public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States.

In other words, as Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States. Worse still, if its efforts to quash dissenting voices in the U.S. are successful, Newsguard promises that its next move will be to take its system global.

Red light, green light . . .

Newsguard has received considerable attention in the mainstream media of late, having been the subject of a slew of articles in the Washington Post, the Hill, the Boston Globe, Politico, Bloomberg, Wired, and many others just over the past few months. Those articles portray Newsguard as using “old-school journalism” to fight “fake news” through its reliance on nine criteria allegedly intended to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to online news.

Newsguard separates sites it deems worthy and sites it considers unreliable by using a color-coded rating — green, yellow, or red — and more detailed “nutrition labels” regarding a site’s credibility or lack thereof. Rankings are created by Newsguard’s team of “trained analysts.” The color-coding system may remind some readers of the color-coded terror threat-level warning system that was created after 9/11, making it worth noting that Tom Ridge, the former secretary of Homeland Security who oversaw the implementation of that system under George W. Bush, is on Newsguard’s advisory board.

As Newsguard releases a new rating of a site, that rating automatically spreads to all computers that have installed its news ranking browser plug-in. That plug-in is currently available for free for the most commonly used internet browsers. NewsGuard directly markets the browser plug-in to libraries, schools and internet users in general.

According to its website, Newsguard has rated more than 2,000 news and information sites. However, it plans to take its ranking efforts much farther by eventually reviewing “the 7,500 most-read news and information websites in the U.S.—about 98 percent of news and information people read and share online” in the United States in English.

[…]

According to local media, Newsguard “now works with library systems representing public libraries across the country, and is also partnering with middle schools, high schools, universities, and educational organizations to support their news literacy efforts,” suggesting that these Newsguard services targeting libraries and schools are soon to become a compulsory component of the American library and education system, despite Newsguard’s glaring conflicts of interest with massive multinational corporations and powerful government power-brokers.

Notably, Newsguard has a powerful partner that has allowed it to start finding its way into public library and school computers throughout the country. As part of its new “Defending Democracy” initiative, Microsoft announced last August that it would be partnering with Newsguard to actively market the company’s ranking app and other services to libraries and schools throughout the country. Microsoft’s press release regarding the partnership states that Newsguard “will empower voters by providing them with high-quality information about the integrity and transparency of online news sites.”

Since then, Microsoft has now added the Newsguard app as a built-in feature of Microsoft Edge, its browser for iOS and Android mobile devices, and is unlikely to stop there. Indeed, as a recent report in favor of Microsoft’s partnership with Newsguard noted, “we could hope that this new partnership will allow Microsoft to add NewsGuard to Edge on Windows 10 [operating system for computers] as well.”

Newsguard, for its part, seems confident that its app will soon be added by default to all mobile devices. On its website, the organization notes that “NewsGuard will be available on mobile devices when the digital platforms such as social media sites and search engines or mobile operating systems add our ratings and Nutrition Labels directly.” This shows that Newsguard isn’t expecting its rating systems to be offered as a downloadable application for mobile devices but something that social media sites like Facebook, search engines like Google, and mobile device operating systems that are dominated by Apple and Google will “directly” integrate into nearly every smartphone and tablet sold in the United States.

A Boston Globe article on Newsguard from this past October makes this plan even more clear. The Globe wrote at the time:
Microsoft has already agreed to make NewsGuard a built-in feature in future products, and [Newsguard co-CEO] Brill said he’s in talks with other online titans. The goal is to have NewsGuard running by default on our computers and phones whenever we scan the Web for news.”
This eventuality is made all the more likely given the fact that, in addition to Microsoft, Newsguard is also closely connected to Google, as Google has been a partner of the Publicis Groupe since 2014, when the two massive companies joined Condé Nast to create a new marketing service called La Maison that is “focused on producing engaging content for marketers in the luxury space.” Given Google’s power in the digital sphere as the dominant search engine, the creator of the Android mobile operating system, and the owner of YouTube, its partnership with Publicis means that Newsguard’s rating system will soon see itself being promoted by yet another of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies.

Furthermore, there is an effort underway to integrate Newsguard into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, as Newsguard was launched, co-CEO Brill stated that he planned to sell the company’s ratings of news sites to Facebook and Twitter. Last March, Brill told CNN that “We’re asking them [Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google] to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem.”

[…]

Notably, Newsguard has a powerful partner that has allowed it to start finding its way into public library and school computers throughout the country. As part of its new “Defending Democracy” initiative, Microsoft announced last August that it would be partnering with Newsguard to actively market the company’s ranking app and other services to libraries and schools throughout the country. Microsoft’s press release regarding the partnership states that Newsguard “will empower voters by providing them with high-quality information about the integrity and transparency of online news sites.”

Since then, Microsoft has now added the Newsguard app as a built-in feature of Microsoft Edge, its browser for iOS and Android mobile devices, and is unlikely to stop there. Indeed, as a recent report in favor of Microsoft’s partnership with Newsguard noted, “we could hope that this new partnership will allow Microsoft to add NewsGuard to Edge on Windows 10 [operating system for computers] as well.”

Newsguard, for its part, seems confident that its app will soon be added by default to all mobile devices. On its website, the organization notes that “NewsGuard will be available on mobile devices when the digital platforms such as social media sites and search engines or mobile operating systems add our ratings and Nutrition Labels directly.” This shows that Newsguard isn’t expecting its rating systems to be offered as a downloadable application for mobile devices but something that social media sites like Facebook, search engines like Google, and mobile device operating systems that are dominated by Apple and Google will “directly” integrate into nearly every smartphone and tablet sold in the United States.

A Boston Globe article on Newsguard from this past October makes this plan even more clear. The Globe wrote at the time:
Microsoft has already agreed to make NewsGuard a built-in feature in future products, and [Newsguard co-CEO] Brill said he’s in talks with other online titans. The goal is to have NewsGuard running by default on our computers and phones whenever we scan the Web for news.”
This eventuality is made all the more likely given the fact that, in addition to Microsoft, Newsguard is also closely connected to Google, as Google has been a partner of the Publicis Groupe since 2014, when the two massive companies joined Conde Nast to create a new marketing service called La Maison that is “focused on producing engaging content for marketers in the luxury space.” Given Google’s power in the digital sphere as the dominant search engine, the creator of the Android mobile operating system, and the owner of YouTube, its partnership with Publicis means that Newsguard’s rating system will soon see itself being promoted by yet another of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies.

Furthermore, there is an effort underway to integrate Newsguard into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, as Newsguard was launched, co-CEO Brill stated that he planned to sell the company’s ratings of news sites to Facebook and Twitter. Last March, Brill told CNN that “We’re asking them [Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google] to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem.”

[…]

Financial censorship

Another Newsguard service shows that this organization is also seeking to harm independent media financially by targeting online revenue. Through a service called “Brandguard,” which it describes as a “brand safety tool aimed at helping advertisers keep their brands off of unreliable news and information sites while giving them the assurance they need to support thousands of Green-rated [i.e., Newsguard-approved] news and information sites, big and small.”

At the time the service was announced last November, Newsguard co-CEO Brill stated that the company was “in discussions with the ad tech firms, leading agencies, and major advertisers” eager to adopt a blacklist of news sites deemed “unreliable” by Newsguard. This is unsurprising given the leading role of the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest advertising and PR firms, has in funding Newsguard. As a consequence, it seems likely that many, if not all, of Publicis’ client companies will choose to adopt this blacklist to help crush many of the news sites that are unafraid to hold them accountable.

It is also important to note here that Google’s connection to Publicis and thus Newsguard could spell trouble for independent news pages that rely on Google Adsense for some or all of their ad-based revenue. Google Adsense has long been targeting sites like MintPress by demonetizing articles for information or photographs it deemed controversial, including demonetizing one article for including a photo showing U.S. soldiers involved in torturing Iraqi detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Since then, Google — a U.S. military contractor — has repeatedly tried to shutter ad access to MintPress articles that involve reporting that is critical of U.S. empire and military expansion. One article that has been repeatedly flagged by Google details how many African-Americans have questioned whether the Women’s March has aided or harmed the advancement of African-Americans in the United States. Google has repeatedly claimed that the article, which was written by African-American author and former Washington Post bureau chief Jon Jeter, contains “dangerous content.”

Given Google’s already established practice of targeting factual reporting it deemed controversial through Adsense, Brandguard will likely offer the tech giant just the excuse it needs to cut off sites like MintPress, and other pages equally critical of empire, altogether.
Read their full report.

This has been a dream of the establishment for over a decade.

One of these NewsGuard “journalists” contacted yours truly with a review of Information Liberation that was so shoddy I didn’t even bother to respond as almost everything he said was wrong and his reading comprehension was terrible.

I figured it’s a waste of time to respond as I would be doing the reporter’s job for him by correcting him and I would only be improving his shoddy work.

It’s blatantly obvious their goal is not to create an honest assessment of any of our websites but instead to compile whatever slander they can throw together to suit their pre-ordained narrative.

JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer has also written an excellent article exposing NewsGuard titled, “Steven Brill’s NewsGuard and the ‘fact-checking’ scam.”

Just look at the guys behind this:

Would you trust those men to walk your dog?

The reason no one ever bothered implementing any scheme like this is because it’s so obviously a fraud and an affront to people’s intelligence that it is more likely to have the opposite effect — negative rated sites are going to be viewed as more credible as evidenced by the fact they’re being slandered by these establishment hacks.

January 14, 2019 0

Tag: MARK ZUCKERBERG

THE RASHIDA TLAIB’S LOUIS FARRAKHAN CONNECTION

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote a column for Nation of Islam publication Final Call in 2006.

Final Call was founded by Louis Farrakhan and is “the official communications organ of the Nation of Islam.”

Farrakhan is a notorious anti-Semite who has described Jews as “satanic” and praised Hitler as a “very great man.”

Tlaib has already faced scrutiny over other ties to anti-Semitism.

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA LECTURER SAYS “FIGHTING WHITE PEOPLE IS A SKILL”

“You have to get used to fighting white people”

**A philosophy lecturer at the University of Georgia was accused of advocating racial violence after he tweeted “fighting white people is a skill”.**

Microsoft Partners With Neocon-Backed ‘Fact Checker’ Seeking To ‘Wage War On Independent Media’

Microsoft has partnered with a shoddy Neocon-backed “fact checker” called NewsGuard which rates websites’ “credibility” in-browser and NewsGuard’s CEO says their goal is to have their software on all smartphones and computers by default.

From MintPressNews:

Facebook has suspended several accounts operated by Maffick Media without prior warning, right after CNN ran a report about the company’s perceived ties to the Kremlin.

An open secret

Unexplained ban

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote a column for Nation of Islam publication Final Call in 2006.

Final Call was founded by Louis Farrakhan and is “the official communications organ of the Nation of Islam.”

Farrakhan is a notorious anti-Semite who has described Jews as “satanic” and praised Hitler as a “very great man.”

Tlaib has already faced scrutiny over other ties to anti-Semitism.

As many as half of Facebook‘s two billion accounts are fake or duplicates, according to a new report from a former classmate of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He has highlighted how the fakes defraud users, advertisers and investors alike.

Corporate and neocon-backed startup NewsGuard is one step closer to its vision of bringing its “unreliable” news rater to every screen after Microsoft makes it an integral part of its Edge mobile browser.

‘Totally transparent’

From anthrax scares to Russia fears

But I wasn’t an Edge user…

“You have to get used to fighting white people”

A philosophy lecturer at the University of Georgia was accused of advocating racial violence after he tweeted “fighting white people is a skill”.

A security researcher has blown the lid off the largest data breach in history as over 770 million emails and 21 million unique passwords have been exposed, eclipsing the Equifax and Yahoo hacks by a significant margin.

Facebook is investing $300 million in local newsrooms and training initiatives for regional journalists over the next three years. But can Mark Zuckerberg be trusted to keep the press free?

Microsoft has partnered with a shoddy Neocon-backed “fact checker” called NewsGuard which rates websites’ “credibility” in-browser and NewsGuard’s CEO says their goal is to have their software on all smartphones and computers by default. From MintPressNews:

**A philosophy lecturer at the University of Georgia was accused of advocating racial violence after he tweeted “fighting white people is a skill”.**

Microsoft has partnered with a shoddy Neocon-backed “fact checker” called NewsGuard which rates websites’ “credibility” in-browser and NewsGuard’s CEO says their goal is to have their software on all smartphones and computers by default.

From MintPressNews: