Covid-related tech exploited for mass surveillance

 

FILE PHOTO: Monitoring view of temperature measurement at an airport © Getty Images / izusek

By: Rachel Marsden

Source: RT

Various governments across the world have co-opted digital tracing for use by police and intelligence services

Covid-related tech was exploited for mass surveillance, just as we were warned

New revelations show that the Covid pandemic has allowed for governments and Big Tech to expand the surveillance-industrial complex that tightens the state’s grip on thought and movement.

A recent batch of Twitter internal documents released by Elon Musk via journalist David Zweig [01] on the platform itself reveals that one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of Covid vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative.

“Twitter did suppress views [02] – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing,” Zweig wrote.

He added that “with Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the non-scientists at Twitter as Covid “misinformation.”

We’ve also learned from previous Musk-approved Twitter file releases of the cozy relationship between government officials – including those working for the Pentagon [03], CIA, and FBI [04] – and big US social media outlets like Twitter, which routinely cooperated on various government priorities and agendas ranging from framing foreign wars to promoting certain narratives about geopolitical competitors (like Russia) under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” All of this in an ostensibly democratic country that’s supposed to value free speech and debate.

It’s only now, when most Westerners are jabbed, that taboos on scientific information about the true efficacy of the vaccines (particularly on new variants [05]), associated side-effects and risks (like myocarditis [06]), and the high protective value of post-infection immunity, are being loosened and no longer routinely suppressed or vilified as dangerous fake news.

Just like they do with war propaganda, the US government and its Western allies went out of their way to manufacture consent, and they used the very same Big Tech platforms that were once the great hope of those seeking to break free from more controlled corporate media. And the gatekeepers of those platforms, like those at Twitter, were far too keen to abide. Under the guise of combating disinformation, citizens ended up applauding censorship and descending in lynch mobs on those designated as the current threat to virtuous Western societal norms – be they “Russians” or “anti-vaxxers.”

From Covid tracking to mass surveillance

And that’s not all that the pandemic has in common with other crises shamelessly exploited by governments. A new report by the Associated Press has found [07] that the pandemic permitted the expansion of global surveillance, with police in multiple countries using “technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies.”

According to the AP’s investigation, Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet, has used contact tracing technology to track people located near a zone of unrest, sending them threatening messages even if they weren’t involved.

China’s health QR code system, managed by three separate levels of government, has required that Covid passes flash green to take a plane or train, but those en route to protests have inexplicably and routinely found their passes turning red.

Authorities in India reportedly used the Covid mask mandate as a pretext to scan faces with hand-held devices using facial recognition software, which can be added or compared to a preexisting database of criminals.

The watchdogs for Australia’s intelligence services disclosed in November 2020 that the country’s Covid contact tracing app was used by the spies to collect data on citizens – “incidentally” – even though it was deemed to be virtually useless in uncovering unidentified Covid cases [08]. But Aussie police have since used the Covid app’s check-in data as an investigative tool, according to the AP.

The US government has used CIA-linked [09] data company, Palantir Technologies, to “power the digital operating system for the U.S. public health response to the pandemic,” according to a February 2022 press release from the company, which has been awarded multiple contracts worth tens of millions of dollars [10] amid the crisis [11].

Remember when the global war on terror scared people so badly that US-led Western democracies, with little pushback, set up a global surveillance panopticon under the guise of keeping everyone safe? Well, the Covid scare has been used by governments all over the world to expand their surveillance networks – all the while telling their citizens that it’s being done to keep them safe from a virus.

It’s not like no one predicted this would happen. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression,” warned [12] NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in an April 2020 interview. “We could have a parallel epidemic of authoritarian and repressive measures following close if not on the heels of a health epidemic,” said the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in April 2020, while referring [13] to Covid as a “pathogen of repression.” “Civil society can expect governments to justify using digital surveillance beyond the pandemic as a means to protect national security, implement governance priorities, and serve future public health interests,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warned in October 2021 [14].

Just a few days ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who just retired as Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, lamented that “we’re living in a progressively anti-science era.” But if he is looking to place the blame for the blow that science has taken as a result, then he should do some soul-searching along with his government colleagues who chose manipulation and information control over open scientific discussion and debate. And where are the demands for the Covid-related mass surveillance to be immediately dismantled? It shouldn’t just be forgotten about so that it can stick around to be exploited or further enhanced during the next big government authoritarian bender. It needs to go.
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LINKS:

[01] The Twitter Files: How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate
[02] Twitter Suppressed Views by Doctors and Scientific Experts
[03] Twitter Aided the Pentagon in its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign
[04] Twitter Files show CIA, FBI have spent years meddling in content moderation
[05] Covid-19 vaccine trials cannot tell us if they will save lives
[06] Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021
[07] Police Seize on COVID-19 tech to Expand Global Surveillance
[08] Document - Inspector General of Intelligence and Security (Australia)
[09] Israel-linked CIA-funded Palantir goes public, making espionage mainstream
[10] Palantir expands from Covid role, wins $90m deal with US Department of Health
[11] CDC Partners with Palantir to Bolster the Fight Against COVID-19
[12] SNOWDEN: Govts will use the Corona Virus to seize more Power
[13] UN Document - Disease Pandemics and the Freedom of Opinion and Expression - PDF
[14] Intrusive Surveillance After the Coronavirus Pandemic

Twitter Files detail Covid censorship campaign

 

FILE PHOTO: - Administering the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in Las Vegas, Nevada, April 26, 2021 © AP / John Locher

Source: RT

The social media platform suppressed “legitimate content” on coronavirus at the behest of the White House, documents suggest [01]

The latest batch of Twitter files released by CEO Elon Musk show how the platform censored posts about Covid-19 that didn’t align with the White House’s message. Qualified doctors and epidemiologists were suppressed and banned at the direct request of the Biden administration, the documents suggest.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to moderate coronavirus-related content, journalist David Zweig reported on Monday, citing the company’s internal communications. While Trump’s team wanted to suppress rumors of shortages at grocery-stores to combat panic-buying, Biden switched focus to “misinformation” about vaccines once his team took over in January 2021.

According to files seen by Zweig, Biden’s staff directly pressured Twitter to ban “high-profile anti-vaxxer accounts,” including that of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson [02], who has persistently claimed that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits.

Twitter complied and suspended Berenson in July 2021, but employees said afterwards that “the Biden team” was still “not satisfied” with the platform’s censorship efforts, and angrily demanded that it “de-platform several accounts.”

Twitter placed a warning label on the account of a Harvard epidemiologist who argued that “those with prior natural infection” do not need to be vaccinated, and flagged as “misleading” tweets that cited the Biden administration’s own data on Covid death rates. It used a combination of AI “bots” and contracted moderators in foreign countries to make these decisions.

A physician was flagged for sharing the results of a peer-reviewed study linking vaccination with cardiac arrests in young people, while another doctor was permanently suspended for referring to a published study suggesting that vaccination temporarily impairs male patients’ sperm count.

“Dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information,” Zweig tweeted.

When former President Donald Trump urged his followers not to “be afraid of Covid” following his own recovery from the illness, Twitter’s senior moderators debated taking action against the tweet, before concluding that Trump’s “optimistic” assessment did not count as misinformation.

Since purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in October, Elon Musk has released batches of documents shedding light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies.

Published by several independent journalists, these document dumps have shown how Twitter suppressed [03] information damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded [04] with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted [05] the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored [06] “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.
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LINKS:

[01] The COVID Files: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate
[02] NYT Reporter Alex Berenson
[03] Musk’s Twitter files: What have we learned from the Hunter Biden laptop story?
[04] Twitter docs reveal FBI pressure to control speech
[05] Twitter ‘directly assisted’ Pentagon’s propaganda campaigns
[06] US spies pushed Twitter to censor ‘anti-Ukraine narratives’ – media

Twitter Reveals How it Banned Trump

 

FILE PHOTO ©  AP / Jenny Kane

Source: RT

Framework for removal of US president was set long before Capitol riot

A third series of “Twitter Files,” published on Friday evening, offered details into the platform’s decision to ban the personal account of Donald Trump while he was still the sitting US president, with more revelations promised for the weekend.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, who authored the first expose last week, began sharing the saga of Trump’s ban covering the period between October 2020 and January 6, 2021.

“We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies,” Taibbi wrote.

The drop includes Twitter’s internal communications of clear historical importance, as the company employees recognized this was a “landmark moment in the annals of speech,” the first time they suspended a sitting head of state.

Trump was banned on January 8, after a “close review” of how his tweets were “being received and interpreted on and off Twitter,” the company said at the time. His last tweets had included a video message urging his supporters not to break the law and peacefully depart from the US Capitol, but also his claim that the 2020 election had not been legitimate, which Twitter had declared unacceptable.

The “intellectual framework” for the ban was already set up in the months before the January 6 riot at the Capitol. One internal message shows a Twitter executive saying that they need to look at the actions by Trump “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

According to another internal message, if Trump tried to use the official POTUS or White House accounts, Twitter would “take action to limit their use” until they are “transitioned” to the new administration on January 20, but not suspend or ban them otherwise.

Another set of messages from Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth reveals he was using “generic” names in the calendar to hide the increasingly frequent meetings with federal officials ahead of the 2020 election. “DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I swear,” says one. A special channel was created on October 8, 2020 for senior executives like Roth, Vijaya Gadde and Jim Baker to coordinate election enforcement.

This “smaller, more powerful cadre” of senior executives made decisions “on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches,” while also “clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.”

According to Taibbi, Saturday’s revelations will focus on “the chaos inside Twitter on January 7,” while the “secret internal communications from the key date of January 8” will be published on Sunday.

Taibbi began disclosing the “Twitter Files” last week, with the help and endorsement of the platform’s new owner Elon Musk. The second part revealed the practice of “shadowbanning” that ended up affecting overwhelmingly conservative accounts. It was reportedly delayed by a senior lawyer at Twitter who had been “vetting” the drops without Musk’s knowledge or approval. That turned out to be Baker, former FBI general counsel whom Musk fired on Tuesday.

The White House has dismissed the revelations as a “distraction” from the real problem with the platform, which press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described as “hate speech.”


LINKS:

Matt Taibbi THREAD: The Twitter Files - THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP (Part One: October 2020-January 6th)


RELATED:

[01] American Coup 2021
[02] Twitter's ‘secret blacklists’ exposed
[03] How the 'Twitter Files' have exposed a senior FBI official’s role in manipulating the outcome of the 2020 US election
[04] Musk’s Twitter files: What have we learned from the Hunter Biden laptop story?
[05] Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter files’ make it impossible for Democrats to deny their censorship practices
[06] Elon Musk Announcement - The Twitter Files, Part Deux!!
[07] Bari Weiss – The Twitter Files (Part 2) - TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS
[08] Musk fires FBI-linked Twitter executive

Twitter's ‘secret blacklists’ exposed

Original Source: RT

A new investigation details the practice of “shadow bans,” known internally as “visibility filtering”

Twitter has created a series of barriers and tools for moderators to prevent specific tweets and topics from trending, or limit the visibility of entire accounts without users’ knowledge, according to internal correspondence and interviews with multiple high-level sources within the company.

Despite repeated public assurances by top Twitter officials that the company does not “shadow ban” users, especially not “based on political viewpoints or ideology,” the practice actually existed under the euphemism of “visibility filtering,” according to journalist Bari Weiss, who published the second installment of the so-called ‘Twitter Files’ in a lengthy thread on Thursday night.

“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee said, while another admitted that “normal people do not know how much we do.”

Twitter moderators have the power to add the user to categories such as “Trends Blacklist,” “Search Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify,” to limit the scope of a particular tweet or entire account’s discoverability – all without users’ knowledge or any warning.

Weiss noted that the tools were even used to limit the reach of academics, including Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who courted controversy after challenging the effectiveness of Covid-19 lockdowns and other pandemic mandates. He ended up on Twitter's “Trends Blacklist,” keeping his posts out of the site’s trending section, the documents show.

However, above the common moderators was another “secret group” that handled issues concerning “high follower,” “controversial” and other notable users. Known as “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” the team included high-level executives such as former Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, the Global Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth and CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.

In one notable example, the top-level moderation team was involved in decisions to repeatedly suspend the Libs of TikTok account, which routinely posted material mocking liberals and progressives, and has racked up more than 1.4 million followers. While the account was told it had violated Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct,” an internal company memo circulated in October acknowledged that it had not “directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy” after all.

The ‘Site Integrity Policy’ group took up a new argument, instead saying the woman running the Libs of TikTok account, Chaya Raichik, “encouraged online harassment.” However, when Raichik’s personal information was exposed online, Twitter refused to take action, concluding that posts containing her home address and photos of her residence did not break any of the platform’s rules.

The release of the documents was endorsed by the company’s new CEO Elon Musk, who after taking over Twitter in October fired several top executives, including Gadde and Roth, and reversed some of Twitter’s previous decisions, such as permanently blocking former President Donald Trump’s account.

“We're just getting started on our reporting,” Weiss concluded, promising that the next installment of the Twitter Files will soon be published by journalist Matt Taibbi, who opened the series last week with revelations about a company-wide effort to suppress a damaging report about Joe Biden’s family.

Musk promises Twitter ‘shadow ban’ reform

The social media platform will soon tell users their “true account status”

Twitter owner Elon Musk has said users will eventually be able to see their “shadowban” status, after reporters published internal company documents showing that the company engaged in the practice despite years of denials under its prior management.

On the heels of the second installment of the ‘Twitter Files’ – which revealed that the platform previously engaged in concerted efforts to reduce the “visibility” of some users and limit their reach – Musk vowed to create new tools offering more transparency into their account.

“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” he said on Thursday.

Published on a rolling basis by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others, the Twitter documents have uncovered a number of explosive revelations about the tech giant following Musk’s multi-billion buyout deal, completed in October.

While Twitter’s senior management under former CEO Jack Dorsey vehemently denied that the site engaged in ‘shadowbans’ to hide certain posts, the latest batch of files appears to show otherwise. Moderators were previously provided with a series of tools to blacklist content which did not explicitly violate Twitter’s policies, including options to prevent posts from appearing in searches, the ‘trending’ section and an overall “Do Not Amplify” feature.

The documents also indicate users were targeted for shadowbans based on their political affiliations, noting several examples of high-profile conservative accounts whose posts were hidden from a broader audience.

The first round of files, shared by Taibbi last week in coordination with Musk himself, revealed details about Twitter’s decision in 2020 to suppress the reach of a New York Post story on then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his foreign business dealings. The call to ban the story – including in users’ direct messages – was made without the knowledge of Dorsey, who was reportedly kept out of the loop for many major decisions.

Taibbi has also posted material showing that hold-overs from Dorsey’s team have attempted to hobble the Twitter investigation, with the company’s top lawyer Jim Baker fired by Musk earlier this week after he was found to have held up the publication process without authorization. Baker previously served as the FBI’s general counsel under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and was heavily involved in allegations that Trump ‘colluded’ with Russia to win the 2020 presidential race.
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Related:

[01] Elon Musk Announcement - The Twitter Files, Part Deux!!

[02] Bari Weiss – The Twitter Files (Part 2) - TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS

[03] How the 'Twitter Files' have exposed a senior FBI official’s role in manipulating the outcome of the 2020 US election

[04] Musk’s Twitter files: What have we learned from the Hunter Biden laptop story?