Category Archives: Tech

Report Expresses Concern for Facebook Moderators’ Human Rights (While They Revoke Yours)

Facebook is notorious for censoring individuals based on their political beliefs. But The Guardian newspaper has rushed to the defense of the company’s moderators, saying they are left with “psychological scars” and “pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day.”

One of Facebook’s contractors told The Guardian: “I think it’s a breach of human rights. You cannot ask someone to work fast, to work well and to see graphic content. The things that we saw are just not right.”

Another moderator expressed concerns over a shift in political views due to exposure to the censored material:

“Maybe because all this hate speech we have to face every day affects our political view somehow. So a normal person, a liberal person, maybe also a progressive person, can get more conservative, more concerned about issues like migrants for example.”

According to Facebook moderators, and The Guardian, becoming right wing is a violation of human rights.

There is legitimately graphic and concerning material on Facebook the employees describe, such as the sexual exploitation of minors in private conversations.

However The Guardian dedicates just as much if not more of the article to Facebook moderators shifting in their political views than them having to see genuinely graphic and inappropriate material.

The newspaper has essentially equated the psychological impact of viewing right wing material to that of viewing the sexual exploitation of minors.

What is The Guardian‘s real concern? Do they genuinely care about the human rights and mental health of the employees, or do they just fear the right?

Sofia Carbone is a reporter for RaheemKassam.com and tweets at @SiCarbone_

EU Rules eBook Resale Illegal.

EU courts have ruled that it is now illegal to resell ebooks.

Previously, the resale of ebooks was thought to be protected under the exhaustion of intellectual property rights.

The precedent for this thought was the 2012 ruling by the EU court which legalized the resale of used software licenses.

The 2012 ruling outlined that once you buy a software license it is yours to resell and the original author of the software has no right to oppose subsequent sales – their ownership rights expire after the original sale.

Under the impression the exhaustion of intellectual property rights included ebooks, a website called Tom Kabinet allowed individuals to resell their ebooks when they were done with them – much like you may a physical book.

EU Advocate General Maciej Szpunar ruled yesterday that this is not the case.

Now when you buy an ebook, you have no rights over the book – so you don’t really own it. Ebooks cannot be resold, loaned, gifted, et cetera by anyone other than the original publisher.

The ruling hurts consumers and libraries whilst giving the large publishing corporations more rights and power.

Sofia Carbone is a reporter for RaheemKassam.com and tweets at @SiCarbone_

Facebook Slaps Kassam With 30 Day Ban Ahead Of Brexit Deadline

Raheem Kassam, former senior advisor to Nigel Farage and former editor-in-chief of both Breitbart London and Human Events, has been temporarily banned from Facebook as the Brexit deadline rapidly approaches, with no reason given.

Kassam, one of the original ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’, has helped disseminate pro Brexit messages with to his large fan following on social media over the past few years.

With big tech’s constant onslaught against conservatives, the idea Kassam was banned simply for being a conservative with a large following, as he receives ten million page views per month, is not far fetched.

However Facebook banned him for thirty days over what they claim to be a post that violates the community standards.

Facebook failed to provide a post which violates the community standards. Actually, they failed to provide any post at all.

https://twitter.com/raheemkassam/status/1166364599584788487?s=21

This is not the first time Facebook has censored Kassam – it’s the fourth time this year.

The first incident occurred at the end of February. Kassam was banned with no explanation whatsoever a few days prior to when he was set to take the main stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C..

After the ban went viral on Twitter, Donald Trump Jr. joined in in tweeting about it. Facebook then seemingly reversed the ban – again with no explanation, comment, or notification to Kassam.

The second temporary suspension came at the end of April, two days before Kassam was launching Human Events as the editor-in-chief. He was suspended for three days on his personal account and locked him out of both his fan page and the Human Events page.

Facebook did provide a reason for this ban: an 11 year old post that read, “men can’t be women”.

Once his account was functional again, an individual at Facebook emailed Kassam personally and explained he had engaged in “hate speech” and subsequently violated the terms of service.

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1131661681728335878?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1131661681728335878&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fhumanevents.com%2F2019%2F05%2F24%2Fkassam-banned-from-facebook-on-uk-election-day%2F

The third ban lasted for seven days and occurred on election day in the UK for the European Union Parliament.

“I was trying to post an update about how people still had time left to vote, but apparently, that would have been too much democracy for Facebook. Or probably too much democracy on the side of which they know my followers would vote: Brexit.”

They banned him over the same 11 year old post.

And that brings us to today, with another ban ahead of the Brexit deadline.

The timing of the bans and lack of reasoning provided by Facebook raises questions over the validity of the supposed ‘violations’.

Raheem Kassam’s only violation of the Facebook community standards is being conservative.

Sofia Carbone is a reporter at RaheemKassam.com and tweets at @SiCarbone_

1A: Trump Refuses to Sign Macron’s G7 ‘Hate Speech’ Charter

The Trump administration has refused to join other G7 countries in signing up to a “hate speech charter” which would have taken direct aim at American’s First Amendment rights.

According to Reuters:

The United States did not sign up to a charter against online hate speech at the G7 summit for legal reasons, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday after the end of the meeting.

“We formalized an agreement for the first time with several Anglo-Saxon and European platforms and with support from nearly all (G7) countries,” Macron told reporters after the summit, which was held in southwestern France.

“We had a very good discussion with the United States, which for legal reasons was not able to formalize the agreement on this point,” Macron said, adding he was hopeful it could be done in the coming weeks.

So called “hate speech” laws are more often than not designed to tackle politically incorrect opinions, rather than any actual criminal behavior.

The United Kingdom has excluded Islam critics from the country on “hate speech” grounds, and Australian liberals recently tried to exclude author Raheem Kassam from the country using similar laws.

Strict hate speech laws would necessarily infringe upon the First Amendment rights of ordinary Americans, and would likely fail the constitutional test in a Supreme Court hearing.

French president Emmanuel Macron has been directly pressuring private companies to sign up to his government censorship charter. Reuters also reported:

France, which is hosting the G7 summit in Biarritz, was initially hoping to make social media giants sign a so-called “Charter for an Open, Free, and Safe Internet” on Friday, according to the official program.

However, the ceremony did not take place and Europe 1 radio said U.S. President Donald Trump had put pressure on the platforms’ chief executives not to sign the pledge publicly. Washington later denied any such pressure.

France’s junior minister for the digital industry said on Saturday the signing had only been delayed and would take place on Monday.

“The initial idea was to make the platforms come to Biarritz and until now, the United States was against the signature of this pledge,” Cedric O told reporters.

“Diplomatically, it was sensitive to make U.S. platforms come to Biarritz and sign something while the American president wasn’t there,” he said, adding that Google, Facebook and Snapchat were among the platforms due to sign the charter.

“There’s no doubt on the fact that the social networks will sign the pledge,” Cedric O said.

In Washington, however, a senior Trump administration official said the U.S. government did not have a position on the initiative and had not pressed U.S. companies not to sign.

In fact, the opposite had occurred, the official said.

“There certainly was no pressure from us,” the official told Reuters. “We heard from a couple of companies that they felt bullied by France to join.”

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Hillary-Backing Psychologist Turns on Clinton Over Tech Bias: ‘Should be Ashamed of Herself’.

A Clinton-supporting psychologist has blasted back against his preferred, failed Presidential candidate after she referred to a report written by him, on the dangers of Google’s online dominance, as “debunked”.

Hillary Clinton was firing back against President Trump’s claim that Google influenced the 2016 election cycle by leading users to more pro-Clinton and anti-Trump coverage. Trump cited Dr. Robert Epstein, who stopped just short of claiming Trump was intentionally targeted for defeat by Google.

“Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election!” Trump wrote Monday on Twitter. “This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought!”

Clinton fired back on Twitter: “The debunked study you’re referring to was based on 21 undecided voters. For context that’s about half the number of people associated with your campaign who have been indicted.”

But Epstein, who posted a picture of himself with Hillary Clinton at the end of a Twitter thread on the matter, refused to let her have the last word.

In a “Tweet storm” (his words), Epstein took aim at Trump for claiming there were up to 16 million people impacted by Google’s bias. Instead, he said, it was up to 10.4 million. Still incredibly significant.

The senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today then turned his ire to his former political heroine: Hillary.

“This is going to hurt me to write, because I & my whole extended family have been strong supporters of the Clintons for decades. I have a framed, signed letter from Bill on the wall near my desk. But Hillary should be ashamed of herself,” he began.

“Hillary has long depended on Google for both money & votes. Her largest donor in 2016 was Alphabet/Google. Her Chief Technology Officer during the campaign was Stephanie Hannon, a former Google exec. And then there’s EricSchmidt, longtime head of Google… A leaked email showed that in 2014 Google‘s Eric Schmidt offered to run Hillary‘s tech campaign… In 2015, Schmidt in fact funded The Groundwork, a highly secretive tech company, the sole purpose of which was to put Clinton into office.

“About 96% of 2016 campaign donations from Google employees went to Hillary. And Elan Kriegel, Hillary’s Chief Analytics Officer, credits his 2012 tech team, informally supervised by Eric Schmidt, for half of Obama’s win margin: nearly 2.5 million votes.

“Hillary: If my work has been “debunked,” why was it included in a volume just published by Oxford U.? Why have I been invited to speak about it at prestigious venues worldwide: Stanford U., Yale Law School (where both you & Bill went), even our Senate (where you served)?

“Hillary: If you examine my work carefully, you will find that it adheres to the very highest standards of scientific integrity. You will also conclude, I believe, that Google poses a serious threat to the free-&-fair election & to human autonomy.”

The Twitter thread went on, underscoring conservatives’ recent points about tech bias:

And while the establishment media paid close attention and gave many column inches to Hillary’s clap back against Trump, they broadly ignored Dr. Epstein’s detailed rebuttal.

The top Google search results on the matter show Politico, New York Times, and CNN articles at the very top. None of the articles detail Dr. Epstein’s rebuttal, and simply hand victory on the issue to Clinton.

A senior Google executive was recently caught on camera by Project Veritas insisting they wanted to stop “the next Trump situation.”

Epstein’s study can be read in full here.

Facebook Bans ‘Women For Trump’ Ads.

Facebook has removed President Trump’s pro-women re-election advertisements, according to reports from tech site Gizmodo, as well as the left-wing Popular Information blog that reported a “violation” of Facebook’s terms and conditions.

Facebook policy states advertisers may not have “direct or indirect assertions or implications” about race, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, religion, or financial standing. So the Women For Trump advert was banned… for referring to women.

Another ludicrous “woke” policy used to suppress conservative content:

Screen Shot 2019-08-20 at 1.05.55 PM

Presumably the ad is not allowed to run because it assumes the gender of those in the picture in addition to the user.

But it’s not really about being “woke” for Facebook. It’s that Zuckerberg and company don’t want users to know how much data they’ve amassed on them. Overtly referring to personal characteristics is a red flag for many digital users who are targeted with advertisements.

In other words, Facebook wants to privately know everything about you, and sell that data. But it doesn’t want you to know that advertisers can see all that when targeting you.

This is not an isolated incident.

An ad inviting donations in honor of First Lady Melania Trump’s birthday used the phrase “Attention Ladies” and was promptly taken down for violating the same policy.

Gizmodo – highly leftist in its editorial line – calls this a “laughably obvious policy violation.”

But it isn’t laughable, nor is it obvious.

A vigilant contingent of far-left activists are flagging Trump 2020 ads that “violate” Facebook’s asinine policies with the clear intention of having them removed. This has a tangible impact on President Trump’s re-election campaign.

Remember when advertisers were open about the demographics they were targeting? Not in digital media. Wokeness plus data mining individuals is leading to secrecy surrounding algorithms, targeting, and more.

If Farrakhan is Banned, Why Aren’t Snoop Dogg and Sadiq Khan?

Not enough people know this.

London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, once represented the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan – recently banned from Facebook and Instagram during the Day of the Long Knives purge.

Before he became the worst mayor London has ever had, Khan was a lawyer. As the Chicago Tribune put it, he was “very much in Farrakhan’s corner… [during] an attempt to overturn the British government’s long-standing ban” on the man who called Jews “bloodsuckers”.

Khan – one of the most outspoken anti-Trump voices in British politics – wanted the decorated anti-Semite in Britain, but not the elected leader of the free world.

READ THE REST AT HUMAN EVENTS.

Kassam in Daily Caller: Warren’s Promise To Break Big Tech Could Be Her Path To Winning Trump’s Voters

For someone so awkward with technology, Elizabeth Warren is seemingly on the right side of the debate concerning the world’s tech giants. Take a swig, Liz.

“Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” Warren said, sounding more like a conservative scorned (like me) than someone whose progressive philosophy is a beneficiary of tech bias.

Kudos to her for being so gracious about it.

“They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else,” she added. Also true.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not quite where Tucker is yet. Especially not when you consider Warren’s appeal to the populist centre — where a lot of Trump voters came from — will have socialist strings attached.

READ THE REST AT THE DAILY CALLER.