Tag Archives: Tech

Who is in Control?

This post is a follow on from the one I posted yesterday but adds more facts and knowledge as to what is going on in our country concerning Freedom of Speech. It is a long read, but I would encourage everyone to read it as it is jampacked with FACTS, not false narratives. And if you will, please pass it on.

Allum BokhariAllum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford and was a 2020 Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. In 2018, he obtained and published “The Google Tape,” a recording of Google’s top executives reacting to the 2016 Trump election and declaring their intention to make the American populist movement a “blip” in history. He is the author of #Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on November 8, 2020, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on Big Tech.

In January, when every major Silicon Valley tech company permanently banned the President of the United States from its platform, there was a backlash around the world. One after another, government and party leaders—many of them ideologically opposed to the policies of President Trump—raised their voices against the power and arrogance of the American tech giants. These included the President of Mexico, the Chancellor of Germany, the government of Poland, ministers in the French and Australian governments, the neoliberal center-right bloc in the European Parliament, the national populist bloc in the European Parliament, the leader of the Russian opposition (who recently survived an assassination attempt), and the Russian government (which may well have been behind that attempt).

Common threats create strange bedfellows. Socialists, conservatives, nationalists, neoliberals, autocrats, and anti-autocrats may not agree on much, but they all recognize that the tech giants have accumulated far too much power. None like the idea that a pack of American hipsters in Silicon Valley can, at any moment, cut off their digital lines of communication.

I published a book on this topic prior to the November election, and many who called me alarmist then are not so sure of that now. I built the book on interviews with Silicon Valley insiders and five years of reporting as a Breitbart News tech correspondent. Breitbart created a dedicated tech reporting team in 2015—a time when few recognized the danger that the rising tide of left-wing hostility to free speech would pose to the vision of the World Wide Web as a free and open platform for all viewpoints.

This inversion of that early libertarian ideal—the movement from the freedom of information to the control of information on the Web—has been the story of the past five years.

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When the Web was created in the 1990s, the goal was that everyone who wanted a voice could have one. All a person had to do to access the global marketplace of ideas was to go online and set up a website. Once created, the website belonged to that person. Especially if the person owned his own server, no one could deplatform him. That was by design, because the Web, when it was invented, was competing with other types of online services that were not so free and open.

It is important to remember that the Web, as we know it today—a network of websites accessed through browsers—was not the first online service ever created. In the 1990s, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee invented the technology that underpins websites and web browsers, creating the Web as we know it today. But there were other online services, some of which predated Berners-Lee’s invention. Corporations like CompuServe and Prodigy ran their own online networks in the 1990s—networks that were separate from the Web and had access points that were different from web browsers. These privately-owned networks were open to the public, but CompuServe and Prodigy owned every bit of information on them and could kick people off their networks for any reason.

In these ways the Web was different. No one owned it, owned the information on it, or could kick anyone off. That was the idea, at least, before the Web was captured by a handful of corporations.

We all know their names: Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon. Like Prodigy and CompuServe back in the ’90s, they own everything on their platforms, and they have the police power over what can be said and who can participate. But it matters a lot more today than it did in the ’90s. Back then, very few people used online services. Today everyone uses them—it is practically impossible not to use them. Businesses depend on them. News publishers depend on them. Politicians and political activists depend on them. And crucially, citizens depend on them for information.

Today, Big Tech doesn’t just mean control over online information. It means control over news. It means control over commerce. It means control over politics. And how are the corporate tech giants using their control? Judging by the three biggest moves they have made since I wrote my book—the censoring of the New York Post in October when it published its blockbuster stories on Biden family corruption, the censorship and eventual banning from the Web of President Trump, and the coordinated takedown of the upstart social media site Parler—it is obvious that Big Tech’s priority today is to support the political Left and the Washington establishment.

Big Tech has become the most powerful election-influencing machine in American history. It is not an exaggeration to say that if the technologies of Silicon Valley are allowed to develop to their fullest extent, without any oversight or checks and balances, then we will never have another free and fair election. But the power of Big Tech goes beyond the manipulation of political behavior. As one of my Facebook sources told me in an interview for my book: “We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right to center in the past year, so we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.” Let that sink in. They don’t just want to control information or even voting behavior—they want to manipulate people’s worldview.

Is it too much to say that Big Tech has prioritized this kind of manipulation? Consider that Twitter is currently facing a lawsuit from a victim of child sexual abuse who says that the company repeatedly failed to take down a video depicting his assault, and that it eventually agreed to do so only after the intervention of an agent from the Department of Homeland Security. So Twitter will take it upon itself to ban the President of the United States, but is alleged to have taken down child pornography only after being prodded by federal law enforcement.

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How does Big Tech go about manipulating our thoughts and behavior? It begins with the fact that these tech companies strive to know everything about us—our likes and dislikes, the issues we’re interested in, the websites we visit, the videos we watch, who we voted for, and our party affiliation. If you search for a Hannukah recipe, they’ll know you’re likely Jewish. If you’re running down the Yankees, they’ll figure out if you’re a Red Sox fan. Even if your smart phone is turned off, they’ll track your location. They know who you work for, who your friends are, when you’re walking your dog, whether you go to church, when you’re standing in line to vote, and on and on.

As I already mentioned, Big Tech also monitors how our beliefs and behaviors change over time. They identify the types of content that can change our beliefs and behavior, and they put that knowledge to use. They’ve done this openly for a long time to manipulate consumer behavior—to get us to click on certain ads or buy certain products. Anyone who has used these platforms for an extended period of time has no doubt encountered the creepy phenomenon where you’re searching for information about a product or a service—say, a microwave—and then minutes later advertisements for microwaves start appearing on your screen. These same techniques can be used to manipulate political opinions.

I mentioned that Big Tech has recently demonstrated ideological bias. But it is equally true that these companies have huge economic interests at stake in politics. The party that holds power will determine whether they are going to get government contracts, whether they’re going to get tax breaks, and whether and how their industry will be regulated. Clearly, they have a commercial interest in political control—and currently no one is preventing them from exerting it.

To understand how effective Big Tech’s manipulation could become, consider the feedback loop.

As Big Tech constantly collects data about us, they run tests to see what information has an impact on us. Let’s say they put a negative news story about someone or something in front of us, and we don’t click on it or read it. They keep at it until they find content that has the desired effect. The feedback loop constantly improves, and it does so in a way that’s undetectable.

What determines what appears at the top of a person’s Facebook feed, Twitter feed, or Google search results? Does it appear there because it’s popular or because it’s gone viral? Is it there because it’s what you’re interested in? Or is there another reason Big Tech wants it to be there? Is it there because Big Tech has gathered data that suggests it’s likely to nudge your thinking or your behavior in a certain direction? How can we know?

What we do know is that Big Tech openly manipulates the content people see. We know, for example, that Google reduced the visibility of Breitbart News links in search results by 99 percent in 2020 compared to the same period in 2016. We know that after Google introduced an update last summer, clicks on Breitbart News stories from Google searches for “Joe Biden” went to zero and stayed at zero through the election. This didn’t happen gradually, but in one fell swoop—as if Google flipped a switch. And this was discoverable through the use of Google’s own traffic analysis tools, so it isn’t as if Google cared that we knew about it.

Speaking of flipping switches, I have noted that President Trump was collectively banned by Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and every other social media platform you can think of. But even before that, there was manipulation going on. Twitter, for instance, reduced engagement on the President’s tweets by over eighty percent. Facebook deleted posts by the President for spreading so-called disinformation.

But even more troubling, I think, are the invisible things these companies do. Consider “quality ratings.” Every Big Tech platform has some version of this, though some of them use different names. The quality rating is what determines what appears at the top of your search results, or your Twitter or Facebook feed, etc. It’s a numerical value based on what Big Tech’s algorithms determine in terms of “quality.” In the past, this score was determined by criteria that were somewhat objective: if a website or post contained viruses, malware, spam, or copyrighted material, that would negatively impact its quality score. If a video or post was gaining in popularity, the quality score would increase. Fair enough.

Over the past several years, however—and one can trace the beginning of the change to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016—Big Tech has introduced all sorts of new criteria into the mix that determines quality scores. Today, the algorithms on Google and Facebook have been trained to detect “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “authoritative” (as opposed to “non-authoritative”) sources. Algorithms analyze a user’s network, so that whatever users follow on social media—e.g., “non-authoritative” news outlets—affects the user’s quality score. Algorithms also detect the use of language frowned on by Big Tech—e.g., “illegal immigrant” (bad) in place of “undocumented immigrant” (good)—and adjust quality scores accordingly. And so on.

This is not to say that you are informed of this or that you can look up your quality score. All of this happens invisibly. It is Silicon Valley’s version of the social credit system overseen by the Chinese Communist Party. As in China, if you defy the values of the ruling elite or challenge narratives that the elite labels “authoritative,” your score will be reduced and your voice suppressed. And it will happen silently, without your knowledge.

This technology is even scarier when combined with Big Tech’s ability to detect and monitor entire networks of people. A field of computer science called “network analysis” is dedicated to identifying groups of people with shared interests, who read similar websites, who talk about similar things, who have similar habits, who follow similar people on social media, and who share similar political viewpoints. Big Tech companies are able to detect when particular information is flowing through a particular network—if there’s a news story or a post or a video, for instance, that’s going viral among conservatives or among voters as a whole. This gives them the ability to shut down a story they don’t like before it gets out of hand. And these systems are growing more sophisticated all the time.

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If Big Tech’s capabilities are allowed to develop unchecked and unregulated, these companies will eventually have the power not only to suppress existing political movements, but to anticipate and prevent the emergence of new ones. This would mean the end of democracy as we know it, because it would place us forever under the thumb of an unaccountable oligarchy.

The good news is, there is a way to rein in the tyrannical tech giants. And the way is simple: take away their power to filter information and filter data on our behalf.

All of Big Tech’s power comes from their content filters—the filters on “hate speech,” the filters on “misinformation,” the filters that distinguish “authoritative” from “non-authoritative” sources, etc. Right now these filters are switched on by default. We as individuals can’t turn them off. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The most important demand we can make of lawmakers and regulators is that Big Tech be forbidden from activating these filters without our knowledge and consent. They should be prohibited from doing this—and even from nudging us to turn on a filter—under penalty of losing their Section 230 immunity as publishers of third party content. This policy should be strictly enforced, and it should extend even to seemingly non-political filters like relevance and popularity. Anything less opens the door to manipulation.

Our ultimate goal should be a marketplace in which third party companies would be free to design filters that could be plugged into services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube. In other words, we would have two separate categories of companies: those that host content and those that create filters to sort through that content. In a marketplace like that, users would have the maximum level of choice in determining their online experiences. At the same time, Big Tech would lose its power to manipulate our thoughts and behavior and to ban legal content—which is just a more extreme form of filtering—from the Web.

This should be the standard we demand, and it should be industry-wide. The alternative is a kind of digital serfdom. We don’t allow old-fashioned serfdom anymore—individuals and businesses have due process and can’t be evicted because their landlord doesn’t like their politics. Why shouldn’t we also have these rights if our business or livelihood depends on a Facebook page or a Twitter or YouTube account?

This is an issue that goes beyond partisanship. What the tech giants are doing is so transparently unjust that all Americans should start caring about it—because under the current arrangement, we are all at their mercy. The World Wide Web was meant to liberate us. It is now doing the opposite. Big Tech is increasingly in control. The most pressing question today is: how are we going to take control back? 

Epilogue. Okay what can we as Americans do about this. Good question and I don;t really have the answer. However, I know what I did and will continue to do is write letters, emails, and texts to all of my elected officials at every level. Thankfully, I live in a red state where mine listen and reply. Even if you are in a blue state write, write, and write. And encourage everyone of your relatives and friends to do the same.  Continually flood them with letters telling them they HAVE to do something about this, be relentless and don’t take their standard BS and quit.

Originally posted 2021-02-05 12:14:06.

Big Tech Needs to become little tech

Wow, do I love this guy! I’m sure some of you out there would love to have this guy as your Governor instead of the douce bag you have. LOL. Sorry we won’t give him up. Maybe, just maybe, he should be our next choice for POTUS, we just have to come up with another party for I don’t believe he would go for the RNC as it is now run by an incompetent woman named Liz Cheney.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched an offensive against “Big Tech” on Tuesday, warning that the social media platforms are targeting politicians like former President Donald Trump now but will soon be coming for regular American citizens, vowing to combat the threat.

“Today they may come after someone who looks like me. Tomorrow they may come after someone who looks like you,” DeSantis, a Republican, said during a news conference outside the state Capitol ​as he announced the Transparency in Technology Act.

The governor said he intends to “protect privacy” from the “oligarchs in Silicon Valley”  – Google, Facebook and Twitter – because the platforms have “changed from neutral platforms to enforcers of preferred narratives.”

“I’m committed to addressing what may be one of the most pervasive threats to American self-government in the 21st century,” he said.​

He singled out Twitter for suspending Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” after Jan. 6’s Capitol riots and Amazon closing its servers to the social media alternative Parler.

“What about the 88 million Americans who chose to follow Donald Trump? Sorry. Content moderators on Twitter pulled the plug,” ​DeSantis said.

​Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasts Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook as “oligarchs in Silicon Valley”.
​Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasts Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook as “oligarchs in Silicon Valley”.
AP Photo/Chris O’Meara

After Twitter suspended Trump’s account, many of his followers turned to Parler, hoping to express their opinions and beliefs in a less-regulated environment, until tech behemoths turned against it.

“What really scared me was the decapitation of Parler,” ​he said. “Big tech has come to look more like big brother with each passing day​.”

As an example of big tech intervening to block information they disagreed with, Desantis mentioned The Post story from October about Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings blocked by Twitter.

“The Hunter Biden story was true. The typical corporate media outlets chose to ignore it. They wanted to beat Trump,” ​he said, adding that the report about President Biden’s son “couldn’t get any traction” weeks before the election.

He said reporters wouldn’t have hesitated to go after him if he were the subject of the same story.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argues that “Content moderators on Twitter pulled the plug” when Twitter suspended former President Trump’s Twitter account.
REUTERS

“You’re trying to tell me if there’s hacked information that could damage me, you guys wouldn’t print it? Give me a break.” DeSantis said. “You guys would print it every single day if you could. And Big Tech would allow it to proliferate 24/7.” Note, he is always at war with the press nerds

As part of his measure, DeSantis suggested fines of $100,000 per day for de-platforming political candidates, as well as daily fines for any company “that uses their content and user-related algorithms to suppress or prioritize the access of any content related to a political candidate or cause on the ballot.”

The Governor also called for allowing people to opt-out of content algorithms, requiring notification about changes in terms of service and providing the right of citizens to take legal action if these conditions are violated.

DeSantis announced that under his policy, the Florida AG would be empowered to bring cases against tech companies under the Unfair and Deceptive Practices Act.

“Floridians should have the privacy of their data and personal information protected, their ability to access and participate in online platforms protected, and their ability to participate in elections free from interference from Big Tech protected. What began as a group of upstart technology companies from the West Coast has since transformed into an industry of monopoly platforms that monitor influence and control the flow of information in our country and among our citizens,” DeSantis said.

“The core issue here is this: are consumers going to have the choice to consume the information they choose, or are oligarchs in Silicon Valley going to make those choices for us?”

Originally posted 2021-02-04 14:35:43.

A Time to Heel

Another great article from my friend Greg.

By: G. Maresca

Joe Biden’s “time for healing” and “stop treating our opponents as our enemies” speech was anything but Lincolnesque as the most divisive, volatile election since the Civil War has put many in doubt.

One teacher’s union has already demanded that Biden oppose any charter school expansion, while putting an end to school choice for Washington D.C.’s low-income families.  This is the same city that Biden won 93 percent of the vote.  With such gaudy numbers, Democrats must believe that everyone is as easily manipulated.

Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain is a former lobbyist for Silicon Valley titans Google, Facebook and Twitter, so forget about restricting their monopoly of social media censorship.

For at least two generations, Democrats have amplified how politics is not about compromise, but unadulterated power.  Any opposition is accused of being racist, homophobic, and xenophobic bigots, who must be subdued by any means in a nation where once Judeo-Christian principles governed our hearts and minds.

Turning a jaundiced eye toward Biden’s platitudes after tens of millions of Americans remained convinced the election was stolen isn’t difficult.  Biden’s plea is political virtue-signaling in the first-degree. Leftists in government, media, sports, big-tech, and entertainment continue to wage a relentless smear campaign against Trump and those who voted for him.

Democrats arrogantly called themselves the “resistance” saying Trump was an “illegitimate” president before he was even sworn in.  So, after four years of character assassination, anti-Trump hysteria and impeachment, race baiting, rioting, looting, and arson Democrats now want healing.

In Biden, speak healing is code for tax dollars that will subsidize abortions, mask and vaccination mandates, open borders, Green New Deal, reparations, and tax increases.  Such actions will only exacerbate conflict and constitutional disputes.

Healing should include exposing any election fraud, no?

Reconciling will occur when the unbridled slaughter of the unborn ends, and when the Little Sisters of the Poor and every other faith group’s conscience is protected.

With healing comes truth and transparency.

How did Biden retail his influence as vice president to the Chinese, Russians and Ukrainians?  What about the police and business owners who were killed, injured and looted?   Are the blacks who supported Trump still black?  Are the nearly 74,000,000 voters for Trump still “systemic” racists?  What about AOC’s call for persecution of them?   What about Biden’s silence on the Gen. Flynn cabal, the Mueller decapitation, and the Steele dossier, knowing they were all a pack of lies?  The left has not only opposed Trump’s policies; they have opposed his very existence.  And now after such debauchery, they insist on singing a chorus of kumbaya’s?

Provided Biden is serious, he will get plenty of flak from his own party. And don’t forget Kamala Harris beacons a heartbeat away.

The healing Biden desires only happens after amputations.

Healing and unity for Democrats is a one-way street and only applies when they are in control, which is why the runoff senate race in Georgia on Jan. 5, 2021 is pivotal.  Provided the GOP is victorious, Biden will have no choice but to govern from the center at least for the first two years of his administration.  That is provided the political mooring of Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, refuse to stand fast.

“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.” Biden like Obama will soon occupy the same White House as James Madison, the owner of that quote and father of our Constitution.  Obama and Biden never knew him, but Madison clearly knew them and those like them.

Unifying the country by a career politician like Biden is wishful at best.  If Washington D.C. is the swamp, then the 78-year-old Biden is its version of the swamp fox.

Our fundamental divisions concentrate on a demise of traditional, moral values.  They are essentially spiritual schisms which evolve from our relationship, or lack thereof, with God.  However, divided we used to be by political ideology, the nation always historically managed to circle the wagons around our shared Judeo-Christian roots, where its foundational virtues and conventions were passed down from generation to generation.

Authentic healing will only come through the grace of Divine Providence, not ersatz political bipartisanship.

Postscript. News is out about Mr. Mattis’ association with an organization not too friendly to the current US policy towards rogue nations. So what’s new with this fellow who says he is a Marine, but thousands of real Marines have disowned this skunk of a general (small caps for him). I find it astonishing that my post entitled “An Open Letter to Mr. Mattis” was posted on 9 June and to this very day it still gets views, EVERY DAY e.g. four today. That post has literally gone viral all over the world; keep it going. I would be willing to bet money he gets some kind of a posting from biden (small caps again).

Hope you are having a wonderful Thanksgiving and enjoying family and friends. Stay well and stay safe. Semper Fi; Jim

Originally posted 2020-11-26 10:52:29.