Instagram blocks Larry Elder

Image credit: www.mic.com

Another conservative is blocked. This time it’s Larry Elder on Instagram’s blacklist. Elder reported on PJ Media:

After averaging 450 new followers a day since March, when I became active on Instagram, my number of new followers suddenly stopped growing. Dead stop. The count read 68.9K. It remained 68.9K for over two weeks. Then, the number dropped by 100. Meanwhile, over the same two-week period, on Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, I continued gaining hundreds of new followers per day.

. . .

After following Instagram's complaint procedure to no avail, after writing a column about my frozen follower number, after consulting with several people who made contact or tried to make contact with the company, I received a polite letter from a Facebook representative identified as working for its "U.S. Politics & Government Outreach" team. 

. . .

After following Instagram's complaint procedure to no avail, after writing a column about my frozen follower number, after consulting with several people who made contact or tried to make contact with the company, I received a polite letter from a Facebook representative identified as working for its "U.S. Politics & Government Outreach" team. [Rep. made several "innocent" lame excuses.]

. . .

Elder then references Robert Epstein’s testimony before Congress; Cleveland Tea Party reported on that recently (go here and here).

. . .

[Rick] Chapman, the hi-tech expert, does not buy the Facebook rep's innocent explanation. Chapman said: "The answer is because they can. And they're not stopping. This attack on you is an example of how bold they're becoming." The challenge is for conservatives to invent and use alternative platforms not subject to liberal bias. For instance, in its June 2019 press release, a startup called Safe Space said it established its social media site for "conservatives frustrated over the censorship taking place on mainstream platforms." Safe Space's CEO said: "Instead of begging Twitter and Facebook to change, or pretending Reddit isn't a puppet for the Chinese, (we decided to) find a solution through capitalism. We've decided to offer a competing platform where no voices will be unfairly targeted."

Full article is here. I’ll ask our household's web expert to have a look at the Safe Space option.

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You Are Being Tracked

image credit: digitalmarketingnetwork

Via Instapundit, a reporter at The New York Times did some searches to determine the extent of digital tracking. Farhad Manjoo’s article, “I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me,” starts off:

Earlier this year, an editor working on The Times’s Privacy Project asked me whether I’d be interested in having all my digital activity tracked, examined in meticulous detail and then published — you know, for journalism. “Hahaha,” I said, and then I think I made an “at least buy me dinner first” joke, but it turned out he was serious. What could I say? I’m new here, I like to help, and, conveniently, I have nothing whatsoever at all to hide.

Like a colonoscopy, the project involved some special prep. I had to install a version of the Firefox web browser that was created by privacy researchers to monitor how websites track users’ data. For several days this spring, I lived my life through this Invasive Firefox, which logged every site I visited, all the advertising tracking servers that were watching my surfing and all the data they obtained. 

Then I uploaded the data to my colleagues at The Times, who reconstructed my web sessions into the gloriously invasive picture of my digital life you see here. (The project brought us all very close; among other things, they could see my physical location and my passwords, which I’ve since changed.)

What did we find? The big story is as you’d expect: that everything you do online is logged in obscene detail, that you have no privacy. And yet, even expecting this, I was bowled over by the scale and detail of the tracking; even for short stints on the web, when I logged into Invasive Firefox just to check facts and catch up on the news, the amount of information collected about my endeavors was staggering.

. . .

The full article is here. (I had no trouble accessing it, although I understand articles in the NY Times can sometimes disappear behind a paywall if you’ve accessed a quota of pages.) The takeaway: we have no privacy. 

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:Michelle Malkin is on Google’s Blacklist

Michelle Malkin reports on her own experiences with Big Tech censorship. Her report is at The Daily Signal. Here are a few extracts:

I learned last week from a Silicon Valley whistleblower, who spoke with the intrepid investigative team at Project Veritas, that my namesake news and opinion website is on a Google blacklist.

Thank goodness the Big Tech giant hasn’t taken over the newspaper syndication business yet. Twenty years of column writing have allowed me to break news and disseminate my opinions without the tyranny of social justice algorithms downgrading or whitewashing my words.

But given the toxic metastasis of social media in every aspect of our lives, especially for those who make their living exercising the First Amendment, it may only be a matter of time before this column somehow falls prey to the Google Ministry of Truth, too.

. . .

My apparent sin: Independently growing a large organic following of readers on the internet who share my mainstream conservative views on immigration, jihad, education, social issues, economic policy, faith, and more.

. . .

Indeed, my first substantiated censorship by Google/YouTube, which was covered by The New York Times, occurred 13 years ago in 2006. Around that time, it also became clear to me that humans, not algorithms, were manipulating Google Images to prioritize unspeakably crude photoshopped images of me disseminated by left-wing misogynists. And not long after, my heavily trafficked blog posts started dropping off the search engine radar altogether.

Read the full report here.

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Protect your rights against those claiming a crisis

Our First Amendment rights are at risk because of corruption in Big Tech, and our Second Amendment rights are at risk because progressives are using crises and tragedy to go for the guns. Prof. William Jacobson puts both risks in perspective at Legal Insurrection:

Every time I think the media-Democrat frenzy could not get any more frenzied, it gets more frenzied.

How seamlessly they have transitioned from almost three years of Russia-collusion-mania to the current frenzy claiming that anyone and everyone who supports Donald Trump is a white supremacist.

Trump supporters now, according the narrative, are both Putin-puppet traitors AND Hitler-wannabees. It’s all so dishonest by design; the leaders of this charge don’t actually believe it, they cynically manipulate their media and social media power to drive their supporters, many of whom do believe it, into hating political opponents as an ideology. MSNBC is ground zero for this manipulative denigration of half the population.

If it only were dishonest, it would be bad enough. But it’s worse because it now has become a hunt to find heretics for public shaming. This is not new, but now it is legitimized as an anti-Trump strategy by the Resistance. Congressman Joaquin Castro naming names in his community, including retirees and homemakers, is a symptom of a culture of total political war on the left. Other symptoms include the attempt to deplatform non-liberal voices from the internet and airwaves, led by well-funded groups like Media Matters.

More here. And the Action Alert from my previous blog on proposed red flag legislation is here.

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Big Tech censorship and bias: Update

I’m posting regularly on Big Tech and censorship, antitrust probes, and related news, as the next election cycle will be influenced by Big Tech and its biases. If we get to a recommended Action Alert, Cleveland Tea Party readers will have more background. Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media reports:

Google Engineer: Google News Search Results Are Intentionally Biased Against Trump

In an explosive video released by Project Veritas Wednesday morning, Google software engineer Greg Coppola blew the whistle on Google News, explaining how it is biased against President Donald Trump. This confirms the results of an unscientific test on Google News bias run by PJ Media editor Paula Bolyard last year (tweeted out by Trump himself), and a more scientific study also suggesting bias. The Google News slant is not a conspiracy theory, though Google of course denies manipulating results. After all, Google employees heavily favor Democrats in their political donations.

"Google News is really an aggregator of just a handful of sites and all of those sites really are vitriolically against President Trump, which I would really consider to be interference in the American election," Coppola tells Project Veritas's James O'Keefe in the video. "Like for example, CNN is the most commonly used source in Google News: 20 percent of all results for Donald Trump are from CNN, when that’s the entire internet of millions of sites."

"CNN is something that Donald Trump and his supporters would call 'really fake news,'" the software engineer rightly noted. He was not necessarily endorsing the accusation, and even Trump supporters who rightly attack CNN for its bias should acknowledge that its news is often based in fact, but embellished or twisted.

"I think it’s ridiculous to say that there’s no bias. . . .

The full report is here.

RELATED from Joseph Vazquez at Newsbusters:

Facebook and Amazon set new records for lobbying spending in early 2019, according to recent disclosures.

Bloomberg reported July 23, that Facebook Inc. spent more than $4.1 million lobbying, and Amazon Inc. spent more than $4 million in the second quarter. It further reported that Facebook's lobbying efforts in particular were the highest “among big internet platforms, an increase from its previous high in the same period a year earlier.” It found Google’s lobbying spending “dipped” to $3.1 million in the second quarter.

As The Hill reported July 23, “The surge in spending comes as Congress and regulators are scrutinizing tech giants’ market power and handling of user data.” The federal government has Facebook and Amazon under major scrutiny for potential antitrust violations as well as political bias and censorship of conservatives.

A lot of unholy alliances.

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DOJ and Big Tech: antitrust probe

Nate Madden on The Hill has the story: 

DOJ announces antitrust probe into social media companies: “Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands." (Click to embiggen, or go to the link here).

How To Steal An Election

image credit:  dawn.com  

Kevin McCullough published “The Democrats' Blueprint To Steal 2020 From The Voters Of America” at Townhall. He concludes:

By adding illegal voters to the rolls they believe they can gain the odds. By lying to the American worker and voter they believe they can depress support for the president and his agenda. And by getting invisible assistance from Big Tech they believe the can conspire to steal a lawful election regardless of the people’s vote.

Full column is here.

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Big Tech is hiding behind the law: update

President Trump convened a summit of social media giants, including Facebook and Twitter. Following the summit, President Trump announced:

“Today, I am directing my administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free speech rights of all Americans,” POTUS Trump announced. “We hope to see transparency, more accountability, and more freedom.”

J.D. Heyes at NewsTarget further reported:

In 2016, before the tech giants began altering their search, publication, and distribution algorithms, conservative speakers were dominant on social media, likely helping propel the president to victory. But by the 2018 elections, based on several studies and investigative reporting, the tech giants had begun — in concert — campaigns to silence conservative, pro-Trump voices, led by the behemoths Facebook and Twitter.

The companies are taking advantage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which “provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an interactive computer service who publish information published by others,” the Minc Legal Resource Center noted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation added that “Section 230 says that ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’” 

But, argue opponents, when Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and other platforms begin censoring content they find politically objectionable, that makes them publishers, and they therefore should lose their immunity to face legal consequences for those acts of censorship, especially if they have taken money from users they are censoring.

The president’s summit may already be having a positive effect on conservative and independent publishers. For instance, The Western Journal, whose Facebook traffic had been reduced significantly, suddenly found its traffic returning to normal levels a day before the summit — after months of battling with the platform to get it restored.

There is a long way to go, however, to ensure that all conservative and indy publishers’ traffic from their subscribers and followers returns to normal. The president has at least gotten the ball rolling, and well ahead of the 2020 elections.

Well, good. It's a start.

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Steve Wozniak’s advice for Facebook users

image credit: wsj.com

David Solway at American Thinker asks the question:

Should First Amendment rights be extended to Big Tech corporations to publish and censor as they please?  This is a question that has agitated the discussion on whether antitrust legislation should be applied to infogiants such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Pinterest and many others that have cornered the market on a public resource, information, and an essential human activity, the consumption of information. A solution to the problem of data sequestration and restricted access practiced by these companies is to rebadge them either as publishers or, alternatively, as public utilities.

Meanwhile, TMZ via Fox News reports:

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has some advice for most Facebook users: Delete your account.

The millionaire, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, recently said that a lack of privacy is his main concern regarding the Menlo Park, Calif. company and Big Tech in general.

“There are many different kinds of people, and some [of] the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy,” Wozniak told TMZ, which spoke with the tech mogul at Reagan National Airport in D.C. “But to many like myself, my recommendation is – to most people – you should figure out a way to get off Facebook.”

Wozniak deleted his Facebook account back in March 2018, shortly after news broke about the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which revealed that the private data of millions of Facebook users was being harnessed by the firm that worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The United Kingdom's top data watchdog group concluded that Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook's data was illegal under British law.

Full report is here. Some related info from Business Insider:

Deactivating your Facebook account does not delete your information from Facebook's servers. It's hidden from other users, unavailable to the public, but it continues to live on in Facebook's vast digital-storage vaults. If you're ever interested in revisiting the photos you posted to Facebook way back when, or getting back in touch with that long-lost friend, you may want to deactivate your Facebook page instead of outright deleting it.

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Big Tech: alternatives to Google

image credit: https://www.naijaloaded.com.ng

Techspot (h/t Instapundit) has a “Complete List of Alternatives to all Google products.” Here’s the principal search engine section

With growing concerns over online privacy and securing personal data, more people than ever are considering alternatives to Google products. After all, Google’s business model essentially revolves around data collection and advertisements, both of which infringe on your privacy. More data means better (targeted) ads and more revenue. The company pulled in over $116 billion in ad revenue last year alone – and that number continues to grow.

But the word is getting out. A growing number of people are seeking alternatives to Google products that respect their privacy and data. This guide aims to be the most exhaustive resource available for documenting alternatives to Google product. So let’s get started (in no particular order or preference)...

Google search alternatives

When it comes to privacy, using Google search is not a good idea. When you use their search engine, Google is recording your IP address, search terms, user agent, and often a unique identifier, which is stored in cookies.

Here are ten alternatives to Google search:

StartPage – StartPage gives you Google search results, but without the tracking (based in the Netherlands).

Searx – A privacy-friendly and versatile metasearch engine that’s also open source.

MetaGer – An open source metasearch engine with good features, based in Germany.

SwissCows – A zero-tracking private search engine based in Switzerland, hosted on secure Swiss infrastructure.

Qwant – A private search engine based in France.

DuckDuckGo – A private search engine based in the US.

Mojeek – The only true search engine (rather than metasearch engine) that has its own crawler and index (based in the UK).

YaCy – A decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer search engine.

Givero – Based in Denmark, Givero offers more privacy than Google and combines search with charitable donations.

Ecosia – Ecosia is based in Germany and donates a part of revenues to planting trees.

Note: With the exception of Mojeek, all of the private search engines above are technically metasearch engines, since they source their results from other search engines, such as Bing and Google.

Our household is trying out Mojeek; we’ve already started using StartPage and occasionally DuckDuckGo with good results. Techspot’s entire list of alternatives is here.

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Independence Day: on strike against Big Tech

image credit; economist.com

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, was on Tucker Carlson this evening to propose something all Big Tech users can do to start to chip away at the out-of-control companies.

On July 4 and 5, Sanger's designated days to make your statement, you can refrain from using your Facebook or Twitter or What’s App, etc. EXCEPT to share your displeasure with Big Tech on your social media.

You can also sign the Declaration of Digital Independence here (I had to try several times to access; traffic was heavy, so just wait a few minutes and try again). Since President Trump indicated to Tucker that his administration may be looking at potential action to rein in Big Tech, perhaps a strong showing on this Declaration will give President Trump additional leverage.

I’ll have more on this topic later this week.

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Big Tech and social media vs free speech

In keeping with recent Tea Party blog themes:

 Mike Lester cartoon via Flopping Aces

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Big Brother and facial recognition

 image credit: metro.co.uk

Oddly enough, the state of Massachusetts is considering some legislation that could begin to challenge the Big Tech’s threats to Free Speech. From WND (linked to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, which has a paywall, so I cannot vet this report):  

Facial recognition programs are becoming more common. From cameras on street corners to airports and stores, images are being captured continuously, reports Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

But one privacy organization says there’s an opportunity right now for people to encourage one state to become a leader in fighting “invasive government surveillance.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a report by Hayley Tsukayama that Massachusetts “has a long history of standing up for liberty.”

But lawmakers “need to hear from the people of Massachusetts to say they oppose government use of face surveillance.”

Polling shows 91 percent of likely voters in the state support government regulation of face recognition surveillance, and 79 percent support a statewide moratorium.

For background, the report explains the threat to privacy posed by face surveillance. And the surveillance “chills protest in public places and gives law enforcement unregulated power to undermine due process.”

The report at WND is here. Eyes on Massachusetts…

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Next target: Michelle Malkin

image credit: medium.com

Jeffrey Lord has more on Big Tech censorship at American Spectator:

Facebook has censored Michelle Malkin — for protesting censorship.

. . .

Michelle rejects identity politics out of hand, proudly calling herself an “American.” Amen and Amen! But in the Jim Crow-style of the Left she is what the Left loves to call a “woman of color.” Thus her posting standing up for free speech and opposing censorship has to be silenced. Because, like Diamond and Silk, Michelle Malkin is a threat to the totalitarian mind-set of Facebook rulers who have appointed themselves the Gods of who gets to say what and where.

The battle against the totalitarian mindset that is increasingly, vividly targeting conservatives with social media to unperson and de-platform them has now reached out to get Michelle Malkin.

Read the rest here.

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Censorship creep

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports (“The next stage in tech overlords' censorship: De-platformingun-PC blogs”):

It's no longer just Facebook, Twitter, and Google who are censoring online content that offends political correctness.  Wordpress.com, a blog-hosting site that offers anyone the opportunity to create and publish a blog at no cost, has decided to de-platform — in other words, kill — a blog that has been operating for 15 years: Creeping Sharia.

As Pamela Geller points out, this move by Wordpress.com is itself an example of the blog's focus of creeping sharia happening in real time.  Shutting down a critic of creeping sharia is an example of creeping sharia.

Related: Newsbusters reports on a development (which may be a start, but doesn’t seem to me to go far enough):

The White House has announced a new system that gives Americans the power to call out foul play by tech companies.  

As of May 15 it read, “SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH.” 

“Too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies,” it continued before delivering a bipartisan message that freedom of speech is a right held by all Americans. “No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.”

The submission form begins with a survey asking users to submit their names and confirm that they are citizens of the United States. It then asks whether they were censored via major Big Tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It also listed an option for “Other” acknowledging that there are plenty of other platforms which deplatform users.

It then asks, if possible, for a link or screenshot of the restricted post. 

In a reversal of Trump’s earlier praise of Twitter as a way to reach his audience free of being filtered by the media, this White House page asked users for permission to send newsletters via email so that the administration “can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

The Trump administration said it was “fighting for free speech online,” while the liberal Washington Post characterized the new system as part of Trump’s “war against Facebook, Google and Twitter.” 

Rest of the report is here. Hmm. Either these companies need to be trust-busted, or they need to be subject to regulation by the FCC.

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