Subjects Archives: Internet

You can always tell how important narrative control is by watching the way people react when their control of the narrative is jeopardized.

Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Last month, British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Assange’s extradition to the U.S., where he faces 175 years imprisonment under the Espionage Act for publishing true information exposing American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The evidence of malware use has now come in from multiple studies, but the accused remain in jail and the trial is yet to begin.

Platforms such as Facebook on alleged state-backed online influence campaigns–has itself received $1.2 million from U.S. intelligence front USAID, for “counter disinformation and communications support.”

It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.”

That’s what’s different this time: Stuff blows up because of leverage and cascades through the crypto space because everything’s interconnected.

Leaked emails reveal British journalist Paul Mason plotting with an intel contractor to destroy The Grayzone through “relentless deplatforming” and a “full nuclear legal” attack. The scheme is part of a wider planned assault on the UK left.

Cryptocurrencies are collapsing across the etherspace. Neil and Jonathan talk to Izabella Kaminska, founder of the Blind Spot and keen cryptowatcher, about Terra, Luna and Tether, the death spiral of the stablecoins, and whether anyone in the real world should care.

For all the public outcry, official probes and hearings, financial penalties, apologies and proposed regulations, Facebook remains the world’s foremost surveillance tool–weaponized in all manner of malevolent ways by any number of hostile elements.

The unsettling video portrays a mock execution of a Russian soldier.

Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who’ve been sufficiently critical of official western narratives over the last few years.

Semi-state actors play a very important role in today’s online landscape and in the 1970s, Graphika employees would likely have been working directly for the CIA.

We live in a world run by algorithms. Nowhere is this more apparent than with platform companies, such as Facebook, Uber, Google, Amazon, and Twitter.

While the OTF presents itself as independent internet freedom activists, their funding, staff, history and choice of targets all point to the conclusion that they are a digital weapon being used against Washington’s enemies.

The removal of Twitter accounts advocating for peace in the Horn of Africa shows the connection between the state and big tech companies. Freedom of speech is an illusion when communications are controlled by corporations which follow governmental dictates.

What remains less appreciated is that the founders of the United States regarded creating a free press a policy issue of the greatest possible importance.

If anything, the use of computer algorithms to guide police appears only to entrench and exacerbate existing biased policing practices. 

Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of Silicon Valley. At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty and keyboard mad.

We can be wiser about boundaries for technology.