By Greg Reese
A look at the history of U.S. Antitrust Law and how it applies to Big Tech.
Infowars reporter Greg Reese explains how Trump can stop the tech giants from destroying free speech.
Should HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ have had more actors of color? Twitter suggestion met with ridicule
HBO’s hit new series based on the Chernobyl tragedy has divided opinion online, but the oddest reaction yet has come from a budding UK actor wondering why the show’s creators had not chosen more people of color for the cast.
While the docudrama has come under criticism for various historical inaccuracies, until now, the lack of racial diversity among the actors was not one of those criticisms — for the simple reason that 1980s Ukraine was not exactly a thriving hub of modern-day multiculturalism.
That should have been no reason to leave black and brown actors out though, according to actress Karla Marie Sweet, who tweeted that there are “so many great actors of colour” in the UK who “would’ve been amazing” in the series. Sweet felt “disappointed” to see “yet another hit show with a massive cast” that “makes it looks like PoC don’t exist.”
Just to clear up any confusion, the show “makes it look” like that to reflect the reality of the time and place — and the producers seem to have been at least trying to create an authentic vibe.
Needless to say, Sweet’s tweet didn’t exactly go down well on Twitter, where she was promptly told to “learn history.”
“You didn’t see PoC because they’re not there!”
One user said perhaps the actors were chosen for the same reason that Martin Luther King should probably not be played by a white person — because he was black.
Another said he was taking a screenshot of the thread because “nobody will believe” something so stupid could have been posted.
To be fair, Sweet did at least acknowledge the lack of people of color in the USSR in another tweet, but suggested that since the actors spoke with British accents (it was a British production), the creators should have just thrown accuracy completely out the window and hired a more diverse-looking cast. Emotions like fear, panic and sadness can be “communicated just as effectively” by people of color, she added, missing the point entirely.
‘Chernobyl’ is a blast of a TV series – but don’t call it ‘authentic’
Having actors of another race would “break immersion” for the viewers, another user tried to explain — but ultimately, Sweet didn’t seem open to criticism, later tweeting about the reactions she had received from “racist Twitter.”
Twitter Suspends Researcher Who Exposed Antifa-Journalist Connections
By Allum Bokhari
Twitter has suspended the account of Eoin Lenihan, a researcher who mapped out connections between mainstream journalists and the violent far-left Antifa movement on Twitter, following a mass-reporting campaign by left-wing activists.
Lenihan published the results of his research at Quillette, where he explained the twofold objective of his project — first, to discover the journalists who were most closely linked to Antifa via social media. Second, to discover if those journalists covered the extremist movement favorably or negatively.
via Quillette:
In October 2018, my research partner and I decided to investigate the truth of this impression by using a mix of network mapping and linguistic analysis to see which prominent journalists who covered Antifa also were closely connected to leading Antifa figures on social media. We then inspected the Antifa-related stories these journalists had written.
We created a data set of 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts based on the follows of 16 verified Antifa seed accounts. Using a software tool that analyzed the number and nature of connections associated with each individual account, we winnowed the 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts down to 962 accounts. This represents a core group of Twitter users who are connected in overlapping ways to the most influential and widely followed Antifa figures. Of these 962 accounts, 22 were found to be verified—of which 15 were journalists who work regularly with national-level news outlets.
The journalists included contributors to The Guardian, The New Republic, Al Jazeera, and the Huffington Post.
Unsurprisingly, Lenihan’s analysis of the journalists who mingle with Antifa on Twitter found that none of them covered the movement critically:
That correlation turned out to be quite pronounced: Of all 15 verified national-level journalists in our subset, we couldn’t find a single article, by any of them, that was markedly critical of Antifa in any way. In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying Antifa violence while advancing Antifa talking points, and in some cases quoting Antifa extremists as if they were impartial experts.
Since he published his findings, Lenihan has had his account mass-reported on Twitter. Mass-reporting is when an account is swarmed by trolls who abuse the “report” button with the hopes of tricking a tech platform’s algorithms into automatically suspending them. Of course, with much of Silicon Valley now categorizing ordinary conservative speech as violations of their terms of service, this is an increasingly easy task. Lenihan’s account has now been suspended by Twitter for more than two days.
Breitbart News has previously covered the mainstream media’s sympathy for Antifa (see CNN: Antifa’s Violence Against ‘Bigots’ is ‘Right’ and New York Times Glorifies Antifa With Style Guide, Tactical Advice) as well as the violent movement’s allies in Silicon Valley (see Wikipedia Editors Seek To Downplay Antifa Violence and Far-left Ideology and Damore Lawsuit Highlights Google’s Links to ‘Antifa’ Domestic Terrorists).
Breitbart News has reached out to Twitter for comment.
VERIFIED TWITTER JOURNALIST THREATENS TO CONTACT MAN’S EMPLOYER BECAUSE HE DID THE ‘OK’ HAND SIGN
“I wonder what their employers would think”
By Paul Joseph Watson
A verified Twitter journalist is threatening to contact people’s employers because they did the ‘OK’ hand sign.
Yes, seriously.
Finnish Twitter user Iisak Selin responded to a tweet by journalist David MacDougall with a photo of himself using the hand gesture.
MacDougall responded by tweeting, “Hi Iisak – Do you have a job? I wonder what your employers think of you making a sign that has been co-opted by white supremacists and racists? Would be interesting to find out. Or maybe a future employer is interested…”
But MacDougall wasn’t finished.
He then responded to another individual who posted a photo of himself doing the OK hand sign with the same threat.
“I don’t know if these people have jobs, but I wonder what their employers would think about them making signs that are closely associated with & used by white supremacists and racists?” asked MacDougall.
That’s funny, because I wonder when MacDougall and his ilk will stop abusing their platforms to threaten to doxx people simply because they don’t like their politics and do some actual journalism.
Respondents on Twitter soon put MacDougall in his place.
As we document in the video below, the media was tricked into believing the OK hand sign was secret code for white supremacy as a result of a 4chan troll and has been whipping up hysteria about it ever since.
‘Christchurch Call’ is a blueprint for more online censorship — and Zuckerberg is a big fan
By Danielle Ryan
There is nothing inherently wrong with the new ‘Christchurch Call’ to curb violent and terrorist content online. No one in their right mind wants mass shootings live-streamed online — but it’s what comes next that should worry us.
Drawn up in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque massacre, which was streamed live online, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s ‘Christchurch Call’ is billed as a “roadmap for action” and calls for the “immediate and permanent” removal of “terrorist and violent extremist content” from social media platforms. It has been signed by 18 governments and eight tech companies.
On the face of it, that sounds fine. It’s difficult to argue against removing terrorist content from the platforms so many of us use on a daily basis. The trouble is, Ardern has already admitted that the pledge is simply a “starting point” — and if you were expecting this to be the moment at which social media companies finally began to push back a little bit, sorry to disappoint you, but they’re all in on it together.
ALSO ON RT.COMFacebook ban on Alex Jones and others is a form of modern-day book burning
Endorsing censorship
Lord of social media, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is afflicted with an obvious and ever-worsening God complex, offered a full-throated endorsement of online censorship a few days ago, saying “…the question of what speech should be acceptable and what is harmful needs to be defined by regulation, by thoughtful governments.”
That’s right, Zuck thinks “thoughtful governments” should be deciding what is “acceptable” for us to say online. There’s no ambiguity there. It’s a simple, straight-forward endorsement of the idea that governments should be allowed to regulate our speech. If that doesn’t worry you, then maybe you’re the kind of person who reads dystopian novels and cheers for the wrong side.
Zuckerberg’s comment isn’t exactly out of the blue. Facebook is already under fire for censoring political speech from both the right and left ends of the political spectrum. The company has banned a slew of right-wing commentators and conservative agitators from its platform and taken worrying steps against leftist and anti-war activists around the world.
Just the beginning
So, if social media companies aren’t going to fight back on our behalf (and they clearly are not), who will? The obvious answer is “journalists” — but they don’t appear to be in too much of a rush to halt this creeping censorship either. Some of them appear to be advocating more censorship, rather than less.
ALSO ON RT.COMNo kissing gays or conservative hunters: Overcautious Facebook blocks political ads in SwedenIn an interview with Le Monde on Monday, Ardern was asked why she decided to focus “uniquely on violent terrorist content, and not more broadly on hate speech, which also contributes to the drift in social media?”
Ardern replied that focusing on terrorist content was just the “point of departure” on which everyone could agree. So this is a journey we are on. We’ve departed at ‘terrorism is bad’ — but where will we end? Ardern said she was wary that going any further right now would “open the way for debate” on potential risks to freedom of expression. But in a joint press conference on Wednesday with French President Emmanuel Macron, she said her hope was that working together, governments and tech companies could “eliminate ideologies of hate.”
That would be lovely — and if only the word were so simple, we could just eliminate all the meanies from the internet and live in an online utopia. Unfortunately, this is completely unrealistic, and when you start talking about eliminating certain ideologies, that’s where things get sketchy. Particularly if we’re going to delegate the task of deciding what is and is not “harmful” (as Zuckerberg said) to “thoughtful governments.”
‘Hate speech’ or ‘free speech’?
Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis is set to sign a bill that would make it a “hate crime” to “demonize” or“delegitimize” Israel. The bill purports to be about “anti-Semitism” but it’s really just a vehicle to censor and even criminalize political speech. You see, that’s the kind of thing that “thoughtful” politicians get up to if left to their own devices. Then again, the Florida bill probably isn’t something that would ring alarm bells at Facebook HQ, either. Zuckerberg already happily complies with orders from the Israeli government to delete Palestinian activist accounts.
As for the US government, it has refused to sign Ardern’s ‘Christchurch Call’ citing first amendment rights — but declining to sign a vague and non-binding agreement doesn’t mean much. Capitol Hill is still swarming with politicians just dying to enforce more restrictions on free speech.
ALSO ON RT.COMFrance wants more govt regulation of Facebook and Zuckerberg calls it ‘model’ approachDemocratic Senator Chris Murphy tweeted in the aftermath of last year’s Infowars ban that the very “survival of [US] democracy” depends on Facebook’s willingness to “take down” more websites that “tear our country apart.” Sure, why don’t they just get rid of any content that could conceivably be categorized as divisive? Sounds like a foolproof plan.
A US government intelligence report last year highlighted a former RT show hosted by Abby Martin as an example of content that sowed “radical discontent” in society for critically covering controversial issues like US regime change wars, fracking, capitalism and police brutality. Be careful out there, you never know what could be defined as “radical” content next.
As journalist Igor Ogorodnev wrote in a recent oped, the aftermath of an atrocity “is a honeypot for short-sighted do-gooders buzzing about looking to do something, but also opportunist politicians to realize their long-harbored ambitions.”
Trying to distract us
Social media is what the public uses to organize en masse in the 21st century.
Is it any wonder that Macron, facing months of Yellow Vest protests against his government, is helping lead the charge toward more online censorship?
A French government report recently called for the eradication of content that damages “social cohesion” and warned that“false information,”“unfounded rumors” and “individuals pursuing political or financial objectives” can have an impact on “the social order.” But who decides what constitutes “false information” and “unfounded rumors”? Is Macron’s government “thoughtful” enough for Zuckerberg?
ALSO ON RT.COMWhite House posts call for social media censorship stories, triggering hope & cynicismOf course, it’s much easier for governments to pass the blame for social discontent onto companies like Facebook, while arguing that censorship is the only solution. If they didn’t do that, they’d have to admit that what really drives mass discontent are the neoliberal policies that have had a detrimental effect on basic standards of living, wiped out people’s life savings and ravaged the planet.
But maybe that’s all something Ardern and Macron can work on some other day — that is, if we’re allowed to talk about it.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Record number of attacks on gays in France: report
By AFP
Paris (AFP) – Assaults in France on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people hit a new record in 2018, “a dark year” for the LGBT community, French group SOS Homophobie reported Tuesday.
The non-profit association registered 231 physical attacks, up from the previous annual record of 188 anti-LGBT assaults back in 2013 linked to same-sex marriage legislation.
“2018 was a dark year for LGBT people,” said SOS Homophobie co-presidents Véronique Godet and Joël Deumier in the yearly report.
The number of assaults jumped 66 percent over 2017, with a spike towards the end of the year when a case a day was being reported to the group.
SOS Homophobie’s helpline, website and legal services collected 1,905 statements from witnesses of abuse of the gay community, 15 percent more than the previous year.
The breakdown of cases, which could involve multiple categories, showed 62 percent involved rejection, 51 percent insults, 38 percent discrimination and 20 percent harassment. Threats and defamation made up 17 percent each with physical assault on 13 percent.
Some 66 percent of witnesses were men, who were “more inclined to talk about it and turn to SOS Homophobie to denounce what they suffered”.
The association said the 42 percent leap in reporting of violence against lesbians appeared linked to the greater willingness of victims to speak out and the influence of the #MeToo movement.
With 23 percent of reported cases, Internet was the leading place for the expression of LGBT phobia in France.
Facebook and Twitter act like an “echo chamber” of daily cases with the social networks recording more than half of all reported cases, the group said.
Buzzfeed Attacks A 14-Year Old Girl, Tries To Get Her Banned From YouTube For Hurting Their Feelings
By
In just another day for the dumpster fire that is Buzzfeed “News,” activist “journalist” Joe Bernstein wrote up an article targeting a 14-year old girl who makes YouTube videos for the crime of having right-wing political views.
The article, titled “YouTube’s Newest Far-Right, Foul-Mouthed, Red-Pilling Star Is A 14-Year-Old Girl,” desribes a YouTuber going by the name “Soph,” who makes videos with social commentary about current events and culture, often filled with vulgar language one wouldn’t expect to come from a 14-year old girl.
Bernstein quickly makes his reason for publishing the article clear, seeming to make a call for her removal from the platform in his sub-title, writing: “‘Soph’ has nearly a million followers on the giant video platform. The site’s executives only have themselves to blame.”
The majority of his article is targeting one video in particular, where the YouTube star wears an Islamic chador and makes a joking apology for comments she made about Islam.
WATCH BELOW (WARNING, VULGAR LANGUAGE):
In the video, Soph uses absurdist comedy in her commentary about Islam, where she does touch on a lot of issues prevalent in radical Islam.
Starting off the video, she declares that she has “become a devout follower of the Prophet Muhammad,” describing it as mostly being a “f*** ton of fun,” despite having to be raped by her 40-year old husband.
She also discusses Muslim rape gangs, which are a very real thing in the Islamic world.
For doing this, Bernstein believes that YouTube should shut her down.
He claims that the platform is exploiting children by allowing them to have right-wing views on the platform, writing:
“Users — and more importantly to YouTube, advertisers — have over the past year started to hold the platform accountable for enabling the exploitation of children and exposing them to disturbing content. But this video reveals an entirely different way the platform is harming kids: by letting them express extreme views in front of the entire world. This is what indoctrination looks like when it’s reflected back by the indoctrinated.”
Since the release of the article, Soph appears to have begun facing targeting from YouTube, being temporarily blocked from uploading on the platform.
Along with trying to get her shut down, Bernstein called her father to try to get comment for the story, something Sophia Levin, the former New Yorker journalist who was fired after lying about an ICE agent being a Nazi did as well.
The targeting of Soph is almost certainly due to her massive reach online.
She has amassed a massive audience of over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, along with bringing in over $1,400 a month from monthly donors on Patreon.
Her popularity can likely be credited to a growing resentment for the “social justice warrior” culture among young people growing up in the Internet age. With free access to information, many young people in Generation Z, or what Soph would call “Zoomers,” are finding themselves latching onto more conservative viewpoints in rebellion to the status quo of the previous Millennial generation.
This seems to be a clear attack on Soph for her beliefs, as they have in the past written glowing articles defending young kids who hold left-leaning views.
Just three days before Bernstein’s article, Buzzfeed wrote up an article defending an 11-year old “drag queen” who was reported to child protective services. That same child was spotted dancing on stage at an adult gay club while throngs of adult men showered him with money.
Bernstein, who has long targeted those holding anti-social justice warrior views, by evidence of his similar targeting of former Adult Swim star Sam Hyde, was also exposed by journalist Nick Monroe for holding his own extremist views.
In a Tweet, Bernstein once said “KILL a straight white man on your way to work tomorrow”.
So this is the left in 2019. Targeting 14-year old girl for holding opinions they don’t like.
The CNN search engine? Google favors stories from liberal news sites, study finds
When it comes to political bias online, left-leaning Facebook and Twitter have been the most common punching bags, but a new study confirms that Google’s search algorithms are also skewed in favor of liberal viewpoints.
Researchers from Northwestern University performed an “algorithm audit” of the ‘Google Top Stories’ box, which is a major driver of traffic to news publishers and therefore prime online real estate. They examined results for nearly 200 searches relating to news events for one month in late 2017 and found “a left-leaning ideological skew.”
The researchers did allow some leeway for Google to defend itself, however, saying that while the left-leaning bias was detected, it is possible that the dominance of particular sources is a result of “successful strategic behavior” by those sources to achieve “algorithmic recognizability” — but whatever the reason, liberal sources still far eclipsed conservatives ones.
CNN, perhaps the outlet most-reviled by conservatives, was Google’s overall favorite source. Of the 6,302 articles appearing on Google’s ‘top stories’ during the month in focus, more than 10 percent came from CNN. The New York Times and Washington Post were up next, garnering 6.5 and 5.6 percent of the results, respectively.
Fox News, the most mainstream right-wing outlet, was the source for only 3 percent of stories appearing in the top box. Then it was back to liberal outlets, with the BBC, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Politico and ABC News filling out the rest of the top 10. Overall, 62.4 percent of the most common sources were left-leaning, while only 11.3 perfect were said to be right-leaning.
Ironically, despite the heavy promotion from Google in the online realm, CNN’s overall audience declined by a colossal 26 percent in April compared to a year earlier — and network boss Jeff Zucker admitted last November that CNN’s audience just “goes away” any time the channel switches from its (overwhelmingly negative) coverage of President Donald Trump to other topics. So it seems CNN is stuck in a vicious cycle; criticized for focusing too much on negative Trump stories, yet not being able to stop for fear of losing more viewers.
Perhaps an even more damning indictment than Google’s detected liberal bias, however, is that nearly all (86 percent) of the stories promoted by the search giant came from just 20 sources across the entire internet, which doesn’t exactly display much of a commitment to diversity of information and opinion.
ALSO ON RT.COM‘Poisonous connection’ of big tech: Google staff confer over anti-Trump search tweak
Publishers selected for the top box receive “a significant boost in traffic” which demonstrates Google’s ability to “pick winners and losers” based on where they decide to direct most of our attention. Such power and bias in favor of major sources could also be linked to the decline of local news, which is competing in an unfair online environment, the study suggested.
The detection of Google’s left-leaning preferences will hardly come as a shock to conservatives, who have been complaining in recent years that powerful online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google have all shown clear bias against conservative perspectives. The grumbling has not been without cause, either.
Most recently, Facebook slapped a number of popular conservative commentators with permanent lifetime bans — and Twitter has been caught out ‘shadowbanning’ Republicans and is accused of being quicker to suspend or ban conservative users over liberals for alleged rule-breaking.
Yet, while Facebook and Twitter have engaged in what many analysts and critics are calling direct political censorship, the story is more complicated when it comes to Google.
The researchers found that it’s not simply whether a source is left or right-leaning that determines whether it goes into the top stories box. Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, one of the study authors acknowledged that there appears to be more news produced on the left overall, something which also affects the results. Even so, Google’s curation algorithms were still found to be “slightly magnifying” the already left-leaning skew in online news production.
Then there’s the bias toward timeliness; the fresher the story, the more likely it was to be promoted in the top box. The researchers called this Google’s “predilection towards recency” and said that huge news organizations like CNN which have the potential to quickly generate fresh content “may be better positioned” to garner more attention.
If Google really values diversity, the authors suggest it should acknowledge that high-quality journalism can have a longer shelf life and “consider relaxing the timeliness constraint to widen the scope of sources available to its curation algorithm.”
The results put to bed the notion, promoted by many Democrats and liberals that Google algorithm bias is a myth. Rep. Jerry Nadler last year called the notion of liberal bias online a “delusion” and a “right-wing conspiracy theory” — although Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee is still a chief proponent of the disproven conspiracy theory that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
Google has always denied that it is politically biased or abusing its monopoly position, but it looks like the search engine has plenty of work to do on its curation algorithms before it can convince anyone of its fairness.
World Renowned Transgender Researcher Briefly Suspended by Twitter for Sharing His Findings
Twitter is now suspending scientists whose findings contradict their terms of service.
By
A world renowned psychologist and scientist in the field of transgenderism, pedophilia, and sexual orientation had his Twitter account briefly suspended by the tech giant Sunday after sharing his latest scientific findings.
“Ray Blanchard served on the gender dysphoria working group and chaired the paraphilia working group for DSM V. He is a world expert in the field. Twitter has just suspended his account for a thread setting out his findings from A lifetime of research. Unreal,” Helen Joyce of The Economist said, attaching a photo of the suspended account.
DSM V is the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used by doctors and psychiatrists in diagnosing mental illnesses.
Apparently, Blanchard’s scientific findings did not mesh with Twitter’s terms of service. The microblogging giant flagged him for violating its rules against “hateful conduct.” In six Tweets, Blanchard laid out his beliefs based on his research:
My beliefs include the following 6 elements:(1) Transsexualism and milder forms of gender dysphoria are types of mental disorder, which may leave the individual with average or even above-average functioning in unrelated areas of life.(2) Sex change surgery is still the best treatment for carefully screened, adult patients, whose gender dysphoria has proven resistant to other forms of treatment.(3) Sex change surgery should not be considered for any patient until that patient has reached the age of 21 years and has lived for at least two years in the desired gender role.(4) Gender dysphoria is not a sexual orientation, but it is virtually always preceded or accompanied by an atypical sexual orientation – in males, either homosexuality (sexual arousal by members of one’s own biological sex) . . . or autogynephilia (sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a female).(5) There are two main types of gender dysphoria in males, one associated with homosexuality and one associated with autogynephilia. Traditionally, the great bulk of female-to-male transsexuals has been homosexual in erotic object choice.(6) The sex of a postoperative transsexual should be analogous to a legal fiction. This legal fiction would apply to some things (e.g., sex designation on a driver’s license) but not to others (entering a sports competition as one’s adopted sex).
After significant backlash, Twitter reinstated Blanchard’s account.
“Twitter has unlocked my account and graciously apologized for their error. My sincere thanks to the people who expressed their concern during the past 24 hours,” he said Sunday night.
Twitter has become known for its censorship of conservative ideas, including that transgenderism is a mental illness, which, as proven by Blanchard, is not so much a political idea as a scientific one.
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