Social Media | Realize the lies

In the wake of an already Quasi-orwellian information purge within the last few years, The UK stepped it up a notch with the introduction of it’s own “Online Safety ” bill. Further amendments proposed recently introduce the concept of determining a “truth score” for social media users.

The amendment has been proposed to be added to the already odious ‘Online Safety Bill’, which would censor “legal but harmful” content, and was introduced by Conservative Party lawmaker John Penrose.

Like something out of dystopian fiction, Penrose, has proposed that the government forces online platforms to maintain a score of how truthful a person is, determined by their past statements.

The proposal says that every user that produces online content, including “comments and reviews” and who receives a certain number of online views, which is to be determined by the UK communications regulator, should have their content indexed and assigned a truth score. The person’s speech is then to be “displayed in a way which allows any user easily to reach an informed view of the likely factual accuracy of the content at the same time as they encounter it.”

In other words, the new law would empower far-left social media platforms, under threat of government fines, to apply ‘misinformation’ scores to the profiles of right-leaning users, with the potential that such negative labels would then impact algorithmic performance.

This would basically represent a dramatic expansion of ‘misinformation’ labels and partisan ‘fact checks’ that are already applied to individual posts, extending them to people. Over the last couple of years, the speed at which the idea of tackling “misinformation”has been used as a tool to censor and suppress speech has been alarming, and the idea of regulators suppressing the speech of citizens has become normalized.

India Mulls New Laws To Fight “Misinformation”

India is considering a new IT Act to replace the current one that was passed over 20 years ago. The new legislation, dubbed the Digital India Act, will tackle “deliberate” misinformation and doxxing, and is expected to have provisions to ensure social media platforms’ algorithmic accountability, data privacy, and net neutrality.

Speaking to India Express, a government official said that the new legislation would focus on offenses in the online world that have significantly “diversified” since the last amendment to the IT Act in 2008.

“For instance, currently under Indian laws, online misinformation is not illegal,” the official said.

The new legislation is also expected to hold social media platforms accountable for their algorithms, which some feel amplify misinformation campaigns.

The official also confirmed the new legislation will address doxxing, which refers to the publishing of another person’s personal information on social media and other platforms with malicious intent. “From the common trend of trolling on social media, we are now seeing increasing instances of people getting doxxed and the new Act will cover it,” the official said.

Sources: Reclaim the Net

Zerohedge

The FBI made queries into almost 3.4 million Americans between December 2020 and November 2021, the US intelligence community admitted in an official report on Friday. The FBI said it was looking for foreign hackers, but civil libertarian groups called it an “enormous” invasion of privacy.

The FBI alone made “fewer than 3,394,053” queries of US citizens in that time period, related to information collected under the controversial authority to spy on foreigners. The findings were made public in the Annual Intelligence Community Transparency Report.

The electronic data was collected legally under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the report claims. According to the ODNI, the number is due to “a number of large batch queries related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors” in the first half of 2021, which “included approximately 1.9 million query terms related to potential victims – including US persons.”

This accounts for the “vast majority of the increase in US person queries conducted by FBI over the prior year,” There were fewer than 1.3 million such queries in the December 2019 to November 2020 period, according to the same findings.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has reacted, calling the FBI’s behavior an invasion of privacy “on an enormous scale.” “Today’s report sheds light on the extent of these unconstitutional ‘backdoor searches,’ and underscores the urgency of the problem,” ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Ashley Gorski said in a statement. “It’s past time for Congress to step in to protect Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.”

Section 702 of the FISA act allows the DNI and the US attorney general to target non-US persons located outside of the US in order to acquire foreign intelligence.

Original story: Here

F.B.I. looks to (further) expand it’s Social media surveillance network

Data mining AI company Panamerica Computers is partnering up with the FBI to give a boost to their online surveillance capabilities. The contract is worth up to $27 million, and will provide the FBI with 5,000 licenses for one of its tools.

The licenses,give the FBI – specifically its Strategic Technology Unit of Directorate of Intelligence – the right to use a data analytics tool called Babel X, which harvests user data, including location, from the internet.

When the FBI issued a procurement call for a tool, whose purpose, boiled down, is to track a massive number of social media posts, the agency said that it must provide capability of searching multiple social media sites, in multiple languages.

As per FBI’s procurement documents, the tool had to be able to scrape data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Deep/Dark Web, VK, and Telegram, while being able to do the same with Snapchat, TikTok. Reddit, 8Kun, Gab, Parler, ask.fm, Weibo, and Discord would be considered a plus.

In addition, the FBI said it would prefer more “fringe” as well as encrypted messaging platforms to be included in the winning bid. Another requirement was for the tool to carry out surveillance of these sites continuously, while the data collected would be held by the vendor and then pushed to the FBI.

Original Story via: Reclaim the Net