Tag: PARIS

Facebook, Google Pour Big Money into Lobbying Congress While Blacklisting Conservatives

CAP

By Sean Moran

Facebook and Google increasingly influence Congress as the social media giants censor conservative and alternative voices, dominate the Internet, and violate Americans’ privacy.

Facebook announced on Thursday that they have banned several conservative personalities such as Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor and YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson, journalist and activist Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulus. The social media giant also banned Louis Farrakhan from its platforms.

Facebook said that they banned these personalities because they were “dangerous.”

Amid calls for greater regulation of social media companies’ potential anticompetitive behavior, censorship of conservative and alternative voices, and privacy violations, Facebook and Google have remained at the top of Open Secret’s database of top spenders lobbying Congress.

So far in 2019, Facebook spent $3,400,000 and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, $3,530,00 in lobbying Congress. Alphabet also ranked as the eighth total highest spender in lobbying in 2018, spending $21,740,000, while Facebook spent $12,620,000.

Facebook’s influence has continued to rise over the years. In the early years of President Barack Obama, Facebook spent below one million dollars in 2008 and 2009. From 2011 to 2018, Facebook’s lobbying spending skyrocketed and reached historic highs in 2018, when they spent $12.6 million.

In 2019, Facebook lobbied heavily on H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, a Democrat bill which would restore the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality regulations, which arose as the result of Google’s heavy lobbying of the Obama administration. In 2019, Google also lobbied on the Save the Internet Act.

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In 2018, one of Facebook’s bills on which they lobbied Congress was H.R. 2520, the Browser Act, sponsored by then Rep. and now Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), which would require social media companies such as Facebook and Google to obtain explicit permission from users for collecting their private data. The Browser Act would also stipulate that these social media companies cannot deny services to users who do not opt-in to these companies’ collection of their private data. In 2017, the Browser Act was the most important issue on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Blackburn said that her legislation would establish one set of rules that would balance the relationship between ISPs and Facebook and Google. The legislation would also prevent the social media giants from unfairly profiting off of Americans’ private data without their explicit consent.

“We need one set of rules for the entire internet ecosystem with the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] as the cop on the beat,” said Senator Blackburn. “The FTC has the flexibility to keep up with changes in technology and its principal mission is consumer protection. The BROWSER Act will enable consumers to make more educated decisions regarding the nature of their relationship with tech companies.”

In contrast, Alphabet’s most prominent issues in Congress in 2019 and 2018 related to labor and antitrust, as well as telecommunications and technology.

Facebook and Google’s dominance on the Internet has become increasingly apparent as Google has approximately 90 percent of web search traffic, whereas in digital advertising, Google and Facebook amount to nearly two-thirds of American digital ad spending, with Amazon at a “distant third” at under nine percent.

In 2018, Google lobbied Congress fourteen separate times on multiple pieces of legislation that would have increased liability for companies that enabled sex trafficking.

Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress extends to its trade group, the Internet Association. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Internet Association spent $840,000. In total, the social media giants spent $2.6 million in 2018 for lobbying. In 2019, the association has spent $690,000 so far. Over the last two years, the Internet Association has focused on the Save the Internet Act as well as on legislation that would increase edge providers’ liability for hosting content that enables sex trafficking.

Facebook and Google influence political elections as well. During the 2018 election cycle, Alphabet donated:

  1. $223,269 to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s (D-TX) Senate campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a prominent critic of Silicon Valley censorship.

  2. $149,741 to Rep. Jacky Rosen’s Senate campaign (D-NV) to unseat Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV).

  3. $135,625 to Rep. Josh Harder’s congressional campaign.

  4. $124,508 to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s unsuccessful re-election campaign.

  5. $97, 364 to former Sen. Claire McCaskill’s failed re-election campaign.

During the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook donated:

  1. $75,005 to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign.

  2. $37,954 to Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) 2017 special Senate election against former Alabama judge Roy Moore.

  3. $34,534 to Heitkamp’s Senate election.

  4. $31,326 to McCaskill’s Senate campaign.

  5. $29,387 to Rosen’s successful campaign to unseat Heller.

As Facebook and Google and other social media giants continue to increasingly censor and blacklist conservative and alternative voices, more and more conservative voices have called for addressing the social media giants’ dominance of the Internet. Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress also relates to political confrontations; during a hearing in December 2018, the then-ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee delivered a sharp rebuke of Republican accusations of Google’s political bias affecting its search engines, even though Google was his top donor.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said  he envisions three potential remedies for big tech’s violation of free speech and dominance on the Internet.

Cruz’s three solutions include:

  1. Amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
  2. Antitrust measures to address big tech’s dominant status on the Internet.
  3. Addressing potential cases of fraud and deception.

“No one wants to see the federal government regulating what is allowed to be said, but there are at least three potential remedies that can be considered by Congress or the administration or both,” Cruz said.

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Watch out, Islamophobia? America’s ‘first Muslim patrol’ hits streets of Brooklyn (VIDEO)

CAP

They’re not cops or armed vigilantes, but Brooklyn’s new ‘Muslim patrol’ hopes to work with police to help make their neighborhood more Muslim-friendly. RT’s Caleb Maupin joined the patrol on its beat.

Founded by a Yemeni migrant and boasting at least 30 members, the Muslim Community Patrol’s (MCP) main aim is to be the “eyes and ears” of Brooklyn’s Muslim community. With uniforms and marked cars complete with sirens, the group could easily be mistaken for regular police – but don’t be fooled. The patrolmen are unarmed and have no police powers. Instead, the group radios to police if they encounter something that requires police action – or firepower. The volunteer-based organization is believed to be the first Muslim ‘patrol’ of its kind in the United States.

The patrol was founded in response to concerns over an uptick in Islamophobia, but they do much more than just patrol the streets. One volunteer who spoke with Maupin said that the group offers counseling, feeds the homeless, and participates in other community outreach projects.

“We’re here to help bridge the community together,” the volunteer said.

Local residents who spoke to RT seemed supportive of the initiative, although a few said the patrol, which mirrors similar groups created by Hasidic and Asian communities in Brooklyn, was cause for concern.

https://www.rt.com/usa/458379-muslim-patrol-brooklyn-police/

 

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JAMES WOODS BANNED FROM TWITTER AMID SILICON VALLEY’S CONSERVATIVE BLACKLISTING CAMPAIGN

James Woods Banned from Twitter Amid Silicon Valley’s Conservative Blacklisting Campaign

Twitter suspended Woods for a tweet that read, “‘If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll.”

By Justin Caruso

James Woods, one of the few conservative stars in Hollywood, has been locked out of his Twitter account for over a week now for “abusive behavior,” once again demonstrating the double standard the tech giant holds when it comes to enforcing rules.

Twitter suspended Woods for a tweet that read, “‘If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll,” according to his girlfriend Sara Miller.

CAP

The tweet was apparently in reference to the Mueller report, which found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson and has been used in various forms in movies and TV shows like The Wire.

Nevertheless, this post apparently met the threshold on Twitter for “abusive behavior.”

Twitter does not appear to have the same standard for leftists. As Breitbart News has reported, there are several examples of actual violent threats going unchecked by the social media company.

  • Twitter allowed a number of verified accounts to participate in doxxing and violent threats against teenagers from Covington Catholic high school in January.
  • Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was on the receiving end of vicious sexist Twitter abuse after she defended Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
  • Actor Peter Fonda said that Barron Trump should be taken away from his Melania and put in a cage with pedophiles. Fonda also called for Kirstjen Nielsen to be whipped. He later apologized.
  • Hollywood star Jim Carrey posted a drawing of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. getting bludgeoned to death by an elephant last year. The tweet is still up.
  • In 2016, various accounts called for and cheered on the shooting of police officers.

Woods has been locked out of his account before for posting a meme.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has previously claimed that while he is “more left-leaning,” his company does not target users over political views.

“I think the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? We are not. Period. We do not look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology. We look at behavior,” he said last year.

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Shock Video: Muslim Children in Philadelphia Perform Anti-Israel School Play: ‘We Will Chop Off Their Heads’ to Liberate Al Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem

by Kristinn Taylor May 3, 2019

Video released Friday by the non-partisan research group MEMRI, which translated the Arabic into English, taken from a Facebook posting by the Muslim American Society Philadelphia chapter last month shows a group of Muslim children in Palestinian scarves performing at a Ummah Day celebration where they sang a pro-Palestine and recited a poem calling for the liberation of Jerusalem and its Al Aqsa mosque that says “We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”

(UPDATE: A different video clip mentions “Zionists”) Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, so the heads they would be chopping off would belong to Jews.

Screen images with translations. In one image, children in the back row are seen lifting Korans high over their heads during the song.

MEMRI’s description of the video with translation:

On April 22, 2019, the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in Philadelphia (MAS Philly) uploaded a video of an “Ummah Day” celebration to its Facebook page in which young children wearing Palestinian scarves sang: “Glorious steeds call us and lead us [to] the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The blood of martyrs protects us… Take us, oh ships… until we reach our shores and crush the treacherous ones… Flow, oh rivers of martyrs!” A young girl read a poem praising martyrs who sacrificed their lives for Palestine, and she asked: “Will [Jerusalem] be a hotbed for cowards?” Another young girl read: “We will defend [Palestine] with our bodies… We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”

MAS Philly belongs to the Muslim American Society (MAS), which has 42 chapters in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. MAS’ website says that its mission is to “move people to strive for God-consciousness, liberty and justice, and to convey Islam with utmost clarity,” and that its vision is “a virtuous and just American society.”

 

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Hungary will not soften laws to allow Soros college to stay in the country

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By 

Hungary will not relax rules for international universities despite pressure from the EU and offers from Germany to mediate in a row over a college founded by US billionaire George Soros, a government spokesman said.

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Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a nationalist who has often clashed with the European Union, has been accused of restricting academic freedom with his new higher education rules, which the Central European University said forced it out of the country.
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“There is no change in our core view”, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told Reuters.
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“We will not change the laws and regulations that govern higher education in Hungary. We still operate on that basis.”
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Central European University, set up by Soros, will move part of its operations to Austria from September because of rules forbidding it to issue US degrees.
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The dispute, often seen as a proxy for disagreements between Soros and Orbán on migration, is one of the main issues that caused the European Peoples’ Party to suspend Orbán’s Fidesz before European Parliament elections.
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At the initiative of Manfred Weber, the EPP’s lead candidate to head the EU executive after the May elections, the government of the German state of Bavaria and the Technical University of Munich stepped in to help.
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Offering three new professorships and new courses to augment CEU’s teaching, they said they would open a way for CEU to issue international degrees.
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A Hungarian government official told an opposition member of the Budapest parliament that Hungary considered Bavarian participation in the Hungarian higher education sector “a step that builds trust”.
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And Balazs Orbán, a state secretary on the prime minister’s staff, said the government was “ready to examine the possibility for issuing diplomas recognized in the United States and Germany as well as in Hungary”.
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However, he reiterated that all universities had to comply with Hungarian law, and Zoltan Kovacs also made it clear that Bavarian participation, while welcome, would lead to no legal amendments.
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Italian integration “boot camp” forces migrants to do free community work, sing the national anthem and wear “thank you” printed clothes

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At the mayor-founded academy in Bergamo, a group of about 30 uniformed migrants form two neat rows, hands behind their straight backs in a military-style “at ease” position.

In the corridor of a building, they repeat in chorus: “We are the students of the first course of the Accademia dell’Integrazione Grazie Bergamo, Thank you Bergamo”.

Then they break ranks, line up two by two and move to a larger room, where two of the students, wearing white aprons, begin serving lunch.

The “students” are asylum seekers and participating in a boot-camp style one-year programme whose explicit purpose is to integrate migrants.

Participants attend Italian-language classes, get internships at factories in the area and have to follow a strict routine.

They also have to do community service work for free.

The academy’s students can only use their smartphones for a few hours a day. For the best part of the day, their rooms are empty, with perfectly made beds. No language other than Italian is allowed. And they look more like cadets than students.

They must always wear a uniform and have three kinds of outfits.

When they are inside, it is a blue tracksuit with the words “Grazie Bergamo” in large print on the back; the second uniform is orange, similar to waste collectors, and also bears the words “Grazie Bergamo” in large print; the third, worn in free time, is a blue shirt and grey sweater with a small school logo, which also allows them to take the city’s public transportation free of charge.

“This is not a school for everyone”, Giorgio Gori, mayor of Bergamo, a wealthy city in northern Italy, about 50km east of Milan, told Al Jazeera.

It’s no place for slackers, he says, because participants “must respect a series of rules of cohabitation” and professional training is mandatory, “with the aim of getting them to a job”.

To get into the programme, participants must pass three interviews assessing their knowledge of Italian, the level of schooling and their ability to respect the rules.

Christophe Sanchez, the mayor’s chief of staff, who created the academy, believes that Italy’s system of asylum seekers’ management is not working and attributes its failure to the fact that they have rights but few duties: “Asylum seekers can stay in bed all day and there is no legal instrument to force them to do something.”

The underlying message of the academy seems to be that participants must demonstrate that they are hardworking people, that they really like Italy and are not troublemakers – in other words, that they deserve to stay.

The fact that the programme includes free-of-charge community work, not to mention the “Thank you” part in the name, gives the impression that migrants must be grateful.
Stefano Quadri, an activist from the Bergamo migrante antirazzista group, an anti-racist organisation, objects to the idea that migrants need to prove they deserve to be hosted, since asylum is a human right, and says free labour “destroys the local economy”.
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A worker at the Ruah coop, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, is worried that students live in relative isolation, with little contact with locals: “Integration means inserting a person in society,” he said.
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But organisers brush off criticism, saying that the programme is effective.
“We have so far done 380 hours of volunteer work and all our students understand Italian”, says Sanchez.
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As for the free labour, Gori insists it is not really free: “Between food, lodging and classes, we are investing 1,000 euros per months on each of them, so in a way they are getting paid.”
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POYNTER ‘BLACKLIST’ OF CONSERVATIVE NEWS SITES WAS CREATED BY SPLC EMPLOYEE

Poynter ‘Blacklist’ of Conservative News Sites Was Created by SPLC Employee

List contains sites such as Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Breitbart

By Joe Schoffstall

A journalism institute released a “blacklist” of media outlets they deemed as “unreliable” that was created by an employee of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center and overwhelmingly contains conservative new media outlets.

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a Florida-based nonprofit journalism school, released the list on Wednesday and declared dozens of mainstream conservative sites such as the Washington Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Daily Signal, CNS News, and Breitbart as “unreliable” while listing few liberal sites,” Newsbusters reports. 

The study notes it trimmed the list “by removing several sites whose stories, though highly politicized, were mostly not fake: alternet.org, cato.org, heritage.org, nationalreview.com, thedailybeast.com, the intercept.com, thinkprogress.org, and weeklystandard.com.”

A majority of the removed sites lean left. Of the removed conservative sites, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank – and not in itself a news site — was taken off the list. However, the Daily Signal, which is hosted by the Heritage Foundation, is included on the list. Another conservative site that was removed from the list, the Weekly Standard, was shuttered in December.

While most of the sites are labeled as “unreliable”, “fake”, or “conspiracy” – or a combination of the three — the Free Beacon is listed as “bias”, a label that prompted further review of the sites that were ultimately removed from the list upon further review and before its release.

Barrett Golding, an employee at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left nonprofit embroiled in controversy over accusations of internal racism from its top management that led to its co-founder, Morris Dees, and president, Richard Cohen, being ousted from the group, created the list for Poynter.

Golding appears to have followed the SPLC “list” model in its creation of “unreliable” news sites, as many of the mainstream conservative sites on the list are thrown in with actual sites that push conspiracy theories. This mirrors the SPLC’s “hate group” list, which contains mainstream conservative organizations alongside racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC’s “hate” list, which it is perhaps best known for today, has helped the controversial — and allegedly internally racist group itself towards its black employees – to garner more than $500 million in total assets, $120 million of which is parked overseas.

“These sites stood next to conservative organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented baker Jack Phillips in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission,” Newsbusters writes. “While the ADF is not a news site, it was likely targeted because Golding works for the SPLC. The ADF is considered a ‘hate group’ by the SPLC and is marked on the ‘hate map.’ The Washington Post even questioned SPLC’s ‘political activism’ and ‘bias.'”

“SPLC has been dropped by Twitter from its Trust and Safety Council and slammed by the mainstream media after multiple scandals rocked the organization. Its hate map even helped shooter Floyd Lee Corkins find the location of the Family Research Council, where he shot and wounded five people.”

Factcheck.org, Fake News Codex, OpenSources, and PolitiFact were also involved in the study alongside Golding.

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SWEDISH DOCTOR SAYS DEADLY PARASITIC DISEASE HAS DOUBLED SINCE ‘REFUGEE’ WAVE

Swedish Doctor Says Deadly Parasitic Disease Has Doubled Since 'Refugee' Wave

“Most people are sick from Syria and Afghanistan”

 | Infowars.com – MAY 2, 2019

An infectious diseases doctor has warned that the number of cases in Sweden of Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease which can lead to death, has doubled since the 2015 migrant wave.

“Leishmaniasis is a disease caused by an intracellular protozoan parasite (genus Leishmania) transmitted by the bite of a female phlebotomine sandfly,” according to Medscape.

The parasites that spread the disease are common in the Middle East, Africa and in Mediterranean countries, however it is not normally present in northern Europe.

According to Sara Karlsson Söbirk, an infectious doctor at a hospital in Helsingborg who has studied the issue for 20 years, the number of cases in on the increase.

“We have in a collaboration with the Public Health Authority looked at the number of cases between 1993-2016 and see a peak of 35 cases in 2016, probably a direct consequence of the large refugee wave the year before, when most people are sick from Syria and Afghanistan,” said Söbirk.

She notes that most of the cases were found in people who had emigrated to Sweden or who had traveled in the countries where the parasite was present then returned to Sweden.

The parasites can remain in the body for years before being activated as a result of a weak immune system.

“The attack on internal organs is the most serious form of the disease (visceral leishmaniasis) and usually leads to death if it is not detected and treated in time,” reports FriaTider.

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Austria: Asylum seekers make death threats against asylum centre employees

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Information from the Austrian Interior Ministry has revealed that asylum home staff members have faced numerous threats on their lives from resentful asylum seekers. According to the ministry, no less than 15 serious incidents have occurred in the last year.

As reported by Kronen Zeitung, the information came about in response to a question posed to Austria’s Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the national populist Freedom Party.

According to the report, many of those seeking asylum have made violent threats against asylum centre employees in order to be transferred to different facilities. In Maria Enzerdorf, a small Austrian town of 8,000 people, an asylum seeker intimated an employee with an iron bar simply because he felt like he should be moved to another location.

Varying motivations have acted as catalysts for additional incidents of death threats made against public employees.

In Salzburg, a migrant threatened to murder an employee over food.

In Bergheim, due to a lack of internet access, two migrants became so incensed that they threaten to kill one of the care workers.

A similar case occurred in Italy last year when a 26-year-old Senegalese migrant physically assaulted an asylum home worker because the home hadn’t apparently attended to his requests to set up wireless internet.

Several cases in Austrian asylum homes have also turned physical with a number of employees asserting that migrants have attempted to intimate workers by puffing their chests out at them as well as at staff security guards. In another instance, a conflict with one of the migrants resulted in a worker being injured.

Although none of the attacks mentioned resulted in severe or life-threatening injuries, several government employees working in asylum care in different European countries have been murdered by migrants since the migrant crisis began in 2015.

One of these tragic cases unfolded in 2016 when a Somalian asylum seeker by the name of Youssaf Nuur stabbed to death 22-year-old caseworker Alexandra Mezher.

In 2017, a similar attack happened in Germany when a Nigerian migrant stabbed to death asylum worker Soopika P. in the municipality of Ahaus.

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