WHO Initiative Would ‘Promote Desired Behaviors’ by Surveilling Social Media
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 30, 2023
The World Health Organization (WHO) is proposing a set of recommendations for “social listening surveillance systems” designed to address what it describes as a “health threat” posed by online “misinformation.”
The WHO’s Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET) initiative claims “misinformation” has resulted in an “infodemic” that poses a threat — even in instances where the information is “accurate.”
PRET has raised eyebrows, at a time when the WHO’s member states are engaged in negotiations on two controversial instruments: the “pandemic treaty” and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
The latest draft of the pandemic treaty contains language on how WHO member states would commit to “social listening.” Under article 18(b), WHO member states would commit to:
“Conduct regular community outreach, social listening, and periodic analysis and consultations with civil society organization and media outlets to identify the prevalence and profiles of misinformation, which contribute to design communications and messaging strategies for the public to counteract misinformation, disinformation and false news, thereby strengthening public trust and promoting adherence to public health and social measures.”
Remarking on PRET’s “social listening” proposals, Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” and a former New York University liberal studies professor, told The Defender :
“The WHO’s PRET initiative is part of the UN’s attempt to institute global ‘medical’ tyranny using surveillance, ‘social listening’ and censorship. PRET is the technocratic arm of the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty, which, if accepted by nation-states, would amount to the surrendering of national and individual sovereignty to this ‘global governance’ body.
“What better way to establish a one-world government than by using so-called global crises that must be addressed by nothing short of ‘global governance’? I remind readers that you cannot comply your way out of tyranny.”
WHO could use artificial intelligence to monitor social media conversations
A WHO document outlining the PRET initiative — “Module 1: Planning for respiratory pathogen pandemics, Version 1.0” — contains a definition of infodemic:
“Infodemic is the overabundance of information — accurate or not — which makes it difficult for individuals to adopt behaviors that will protect their health and the health of their families and communities.
“The infodemic can directly impact health, hamper the implementation of public health countermeasures and undermine trust and social cohesiveness.”
The document recommends that in response to the “infodemic,” countries should “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
According to the WHO document, this can be done if governments “establish and invest in resources for social listening surveillance systems and capacities to identify concerns as well as rumors and misinformation.”
Such resources include “new tools and approaches for social listening … using new technologies such as artificial intelligence to listen to population concerns on social media.”
According to the document:
“To build trust, it’s important to be responsive to needs and concerns, to relay timely information, and to train leaders and HCWs [healthcare workers] in risk communications principles and encourage their application.”
Risk communications “should be tailored to the community of interest, focusing on and prioritizing vulnerable groups,” the WHO said.
“Tailored” communication was a hallmark of public health efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For instance, in November 2021, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council launched the Mercury Project, which aimed “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation” — in part by studying “differential impacts across socio-demographic groups.”
Similarly, PRET states that it will “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
These “tools and approaches” could be deployed during “acute respiratory events,” according to the document, which recommends that governments:
“Develop and implement communication and behavior change strategies based on infodemic insights, and test them during acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza.
“This includes implementing infodemic management across sectors, and having a coordinated approach with other actors, including academia, civil society, and international agencies.”
This is not the first time the WHO has addressed the so-called “infodemic.”
A WHO review published Sept. 1, 2022, titled “Infodemics and health misinformation: a systematic review of reviews,” found that “infodemics and misinformation … often negatively impact people’s mental health and increase vaccine hesitancy, and can delay the provision of health care.”
In the review, the WHO concluded that “infodemics” can be addressed by “developing legal policies, creating and promoting awareness campaigns, improving health-related content in mass media and increasing people’s digital and health literacy.”
And a separate, undated WHO document advises the public on how we can “flatten the infodemic curve.”
WHO, Google announce collaboration targeting ‘medical misinformation’
The WHO’s PRET proposals coincided with a new multi-year collaboration agreement with Google for the provision of “credible health-related information to help billions of people around the world respond to emerging and future public health issues.”
The agreement was announced on May 23 by Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google’s chief health officer, on the company’s blog. She wrote:
“Information is a critical determinant of health. Getting the right information, at the right time can lead to better health outcomes for all. We saw this firsthand with the COVID-19 pandemic when it was difficult for people worldwide to find useful information online.
“We worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) on a range of efforts to help people make informed decisions about their health — from an SOS alert to surfacing locally relevant content about COVID-19 to YouTube policies on medical misinformation.”
One way Google will collaborate with the WHO is through the creation of more “knowledge panels” that will prominently appear in search results for health-related questions on the platform.
“Each day people come to Google Search looking for trustworthy information on various health conditions and symptoms,” DeSalvo wrote. “To help them access trustworthy information our Knowledge Panels cite content from reliable sources covering hundreds of conditions from the common cold to anxiety.”
“Working closely with WHO, we’ll soon expand to cover more conditions such as COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], hypertension, type 2 diabetes, Mpox, Ebola, depressive disorder, malaria and more,” she added.
Google will make these Knowledge Panels available in several languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.
DeSalvo’s May 23 post also addressed an ongoing collaboration between Google and the WHO, Open Health Stack (OHS), which “help[s] accelerate the digital transformation of health systems around the world” and “lower[s] the barrier to equitable healthcare.”
Google also awarded the WHO with more than $320 million “in donated Google Search advertising via ad grants” allowing the agency “to publish health topics beyond COVID-19, such as Mpox, mental health, flu, Ebola, and natural disasters.”
Google is slated to provide an additional $50 million in ad grants to the WHO this year.
According to Google, the ad grants to the WHO represent the company’s largest such donation to a single organization.
Separately, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tweeted on May 22 about the agency’s own efforts at combating purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The tweet contains a 35-second video, which claims “misinformation” travels “six times faster than the facts,” while promoting the FDA’s “Rumor Control” initiative.
A top priority of FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, “Rumor Control” was launched in August 2022 and joins other agency initiatives to fight “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
“The growing spread of rumors, misinformation and disinformation about science, medicine, and the FDA, is putting patients and consumers at risk,” according to the FDA’s Rumor Control webpage. “We’re here to provide the facts.”
The initiative asks the public to do “three easy things” to “stop rumors from spreading”: “don’t believe the rumors,” “don’t pass them along” and “get health information from trusted sources like the FDA and our government partners.”
“Rumor Control” appears to have been inspired by an initiative developed by the Virality Project, “a coalition of research entities” from six institutions “focused on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, public health officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms.”
Documents released as part of the “Twitter files” in March revealed that the Virality Project, based out of the Stanford Internet Observatory, also called for the creation of a disinformation board just one day before Biden announced plans to launch his government-run Disinformation Governance Board.
Similar to PRET’s recommendations to target “accurate” information that nevertheless contradicts establishment public health narratives, the Virality Project worked with Twitter and other social media platforms, recommending they “take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”
These censorship efforts included at least one tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman on leave of Children’s Health Defense.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Google Renews Its Partnership With The WHO
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 25, 2023
Google has renewed its partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide what it calls “factual” information about different diseases and conditions. The partnership is positioned as a way to combat what it says is the spread of medical “misinformation” observed during the pandemic.
On Google search, there are already Knowledge Panels at the top of results when users search for certain conditions and diseases.
Soon, the Knowledge Panels will include more conditions and illnesses like depressive disorder, Ebola, COPD, malaria, hypertension, diabetes, Mpox, and others, all using information verified by the WHO.
In a previous partnership, Google awarded more than $320 million to the WHO in Ad Grants to help spread its medical information. In the new partnership, Google awarded the global public health organization an additional $50 million to continue the efforts.
The WHO has been criticized more in frequent years for calling for censorship while itself putting out information during the pandemic that turned out to ultimately be untrue.
Google’s YouTube was criticized for censoring anything that went against the WHO during the pandemic, even if independent commentators ended up being correct.
EU demands more online censorship
RT | April 25, 2023
The European Commission has designated 19 online platforms under its Digital Services Act, a move that opens them up to hefty fines if they target advertisements at certain users, publish illegal content, or fail to “address the spread of disinformation.”
In an announcement on Tuesday, the commission named 17 “Very Large Online Platforms” and two “Very Large Online Search Engines,” defined as those reaching at least 45 million monthly active users. Among the platforms cited are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, while Google and Microsoft’s Bing are the two designated search engines.
The decision means that as of August, these platforms must be in compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that came into force in November.
To avoid fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover, the commission stated that these platforms must label all advertisements as such and avoid targeting ads at users based on “sensitive data” such as their ethnicity, sexuality, or political orientation.
Targeting ads toward children will no longer be permitted, and platforms will have to “redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety of minors,” the commission said.
Regarding content moderation, platforms will be required to restrict the “dissemination of illegal content” and “address the spread of disinformation.” The entire text of the DSA mentions the word “disinformation” 13 times without defining it. Free speech activists have argued that the term is often used by governments to silence factually correct yet politically inconvenient narratives.
The commission also warned that platforms and search engines will need to address “negative effects on freedom of expression,” a requirement that could clash with the demand to tackle “disinformation.”
While the DSA was being drafted last year, EU officials singled out Twitter as a company that would be forced to comply with its requirements. Immediately after billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform and set about rolling back some of its restrictive speech policies, EU industry chief Thierry Breton declared that “in Europe, the bird will fly by our European rules.”
Two months later, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova warned that Twitter would face “sanctions” if it breached the DSA. Jourova cited Musk’s banning of several prominent journalists – who shared information on his whereabouts – as potential DSA violations.
FBI targeting Russians on Facebook
RT | April 9, 2023
The FBI has launched a social media campaign seeking to convince Russian nationals to provide sensitive information about the activities of their home country’s authorities, Fox News reported on Friday. The ad, which was first posted in February, was said to have been appearing on Twitter, Facebook and Google.
“Do you want to change your future?” Alan Kohler, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, says in the video shared online. “The FBI values you. The FBI can help you. But only you have the power to take the first step.”
Fox News cited a source as saying that, although the Bureau has run ads targeting Russians in the past, this year it decided that “a video was more effective.”
The FBI’s website encourages Russians willing to offer information to visit the bureau’s main office in Washington, DC, to call the FBI hotline, or to send a message online.
The US stepped up efforts to recruit informants in recent years as Moscow and Washington have been locked in a diplomatic row over Ukraine. In 2019, the Bureau posted a series of ads on Facebook, urging Russians to come forward, although this message, written in Russian, contained typos.
In 2020, the FBI’s online campaign aimed at potential Russian informants included images of popular Soviet actor and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, known for portraying a police detective on screen. The CIA, meanwhile, has been publishing job postings for people who speak Russian.
Google Expands Campaign to ‘Inoculate’ People Against ‘Misinformation,’ But Critics Say It’s All About Money
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 22, 2023
Google said last week it plans to expand into Germany its campaign to “inoculate” people against misinformation — as if it were a virus — after seeing “promising results” in Eastern Europe.
The campaign is based on an approach called “prebunking” designed to teach people how to spot false claims before encountering them, thereby “inoculating” them against the “disease” of misinformation “like a vaccine does” against a physical disease, Euronews reported.
The tech giant will release a series of short videos that highlight techniques — such as fear-mongering, scapegoating, false comparisons, exaggeration and missing context — that are commonly used to promote misleading claims.
The videos dissect these different techniques so viewers can more readily recognize them when consuming media.
Proponents of the campaign say it’s an “efficient way to address misinformation at scale.”
But some critics allege Google’s campaign is selectively targeting information related to corporate and government interests and is motivated by money rather than a sincere desire to protect readers from false information.
“They [Google’s leaders] want Google to be what they see as a safe place for advertisers,” said Clayton Morris, a former Fox News anchor who co-hosts the online news show “Redacted.”
Videos to run as ads on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok
Google’s “prebunking” videos will run as advertisements on Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works, the AP reported.
Last fall, Google ran a test video campaign in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The campaign focused on inoculating viewers against “false claims about Ukrainian refugees” and showed techniques commonly used to support such claims, such as alarming or unfounded stories about refugees committing crimes or taking jobs away from residents.
The AP did not report the specific statements regarding Ukrainian refugees that Google deemed as false.
The videos were viewed 38 million times on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter.
Researchers said people who viewed the videos were more likely to be able to identify misinformation techniques and less likely to spread false claims than people who hadn’t watched the video.
‘You can think of misinformation as a virus’
Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise, a media literacy initiative of the Poynter Institute, told the AP that the strategy was a “pretty efficient way to address misinformation at scale, because you can reach a lot of people while at the same time address a wide range of misinformation.”
In November 2022, Google and YouTube gave the Poynter Institute $13.5 million to strengthen its fact-checking efforts with $12 million earmarked to create a Global Fact Check Fund.
“You can think of misinformation as a virus,” Sander van der Linden, Ph.D., professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge, told the AP. “It spreads. It lingers. It can make people act in certain ways.”
It also sometimes needs a periodic “booster,” according to the AP, because the effects of the videos eventually wear off.
Van der Linden assisted Google in developing its prebunking campaign and is presently advising Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, the AP said.
Google announced its expanded campaign just before the Feb. 17 start of the Munich Security Conference.
According to the AP, the timing of the announcement reflected the heightened concerns of government officials and tech companies regarding the impact of misinformation.
“There’s a real appetite for solutions,” Beth Goldberg, head of research and development at Jigsaw, a unit of Google that “explores threats to open societies,” told the AP. “Using ads as a vehicle to counter a disinformation technique is pretty novel. And we’re excited about the results.”
Google has not announced plans to expand its campaign to the U.S., so it remains unknown if and when the California-based company will apply its misinformation prebunking tactics on its home turf.
‘Prebunking’ campaign more about promoting ‘corporate and government interests,’ say critics
Commenting on Google’s latest announcement, “Redacted” co-host Natali Morris said, “It’s clear the corporate idea of disinformation is really only related to corporate and government interests — not at all to human interest.”
The topics addressed by Google’s misinformation campaign, such as COVID-19 and climate change, are topics “that will either give governments or corporations more power,” Natali said.
Meanwhile, other topics of human interest — such as child trafficking — remain untouched by Google, she said.
Clayton Morris, who co-hosts “Redacted” with his wife Natali, said he believed Google’s efforts to fight misinformation are motivated by money.
For example, Clayton said, companies like Pfizer and Moderna spend billions of dollars in advertising and Google wants to be an “advertiser-friendly environment” so it “pushes down” information and opinions that criticize the companies’ pharmaceutical products.
“Imagine if Pfizer execs are sitting there and they’re thinking about where to put their ad dollars and they start seeing Google search results that are like Pfizer this, Pfizer that … that’s why they [Google] downrank all of this stuff to push that stuff away and they continue to make their good ad revenue,” he said.
Now the pharmaceutical companies don’t even have to produce ads anymore because Google is essentially doing it for them, Natali added.
“Imagine what a prebunking video would look like around a COVID vaccine,” she said.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Gmail’s Czech Election Campaign Interference
By Přemysl Janýr | February 5, 2023
On 18 January, a few days before the presidential election, I received an email from a non-political group of friends with an anti-Babiš pamphlet. I replied with an anti-Petr picture that I had received shortly before. Out of a group of forty recipients, seven emails were returned to me as undeliverable because “This message does not pass authentication checks” (SPF and DKIM both 5.7.26 do not pass).
This has never happened to me in decades of assiduous email communication. From time to time some mail is undeliverable, the address no longer exists, it has overflowed, etc., but so far no one has ever blocked the delivery of my message and withal to such an extent. I checked all seven error messages, all of them gmail.com addresses. So a few minutes later I sent out another email to the group informing that gmail.com was blocking Petr Pavel’s picture. It was delivered to all of them, including the seven.
So the difference in deliverability was clearly not related to authentication requirements, but to Petr Pavel’s picture. I pasted it directly into the email body without any comment, not as an attachment. I don’t know how long it had been circulating on the Internet, but gmail.com knew it, recognizes it in emails by the content, and takes it into account in its algorithms to determine which messages to deliver to its clients and which to hide from them. Gmail is owned by the US corporation Google. And since Czech elections have to be irrelevant to it from a business point of view, it is obviously accommodating other entities for which they are not irrelevant. Of course, someone familiar with the Czech conditions had to evaluate Petr Pavel’s picture for them.
Mail, like a letter or any verbal or telephone conversation, is a private communication between two or more persons. The censorship of content described is analogous to the post office unsealing letters and deciding whether to deliver them based on their content. Or to a telephone provider listening to what you are talking about and cutting the connection if the subject matter is inappropriate. According to Czech law, it is a criminal offence.
This is compounded by the delicate fact that our private communications concerned electoral preferences, and that gmail.com was apparently disturbed not by a pamphlet disparaging Andrej Babiš, but by a picture disparaging Petr Pavel. This corresponds to a manipulation of the Czech election campaign by a foreign entity in favour of one of the candidates. And if we consider that Google offers not only an e-mail server, but also a virtually monopolistic search portal and a number of other services used by Czech citizens, it can covertly influence electoral preferences to a considerable extent. Even this is a criminal offence.
On the same day, I filed a criminal complaint with the prosecutor and a notification of election manipulation with the Ministry of the Interior. I published both submissions, including the suppressed image, in a posting on my blog http://www.janyr.eu and sent out a notice to my readers with a link, but forgot to release the posting before doing so. The notifications reached all recipients without any problems.
In no time, the first responded that the posting was unavailable. I immediately corrected that and sent out the notification again with an apology. Twenty addresses on gmail.com denied the delivery. I sent another email to those affected informing them that they had not received the link to the posting together with a link to my blog where they could find it. It went through to all twenty.
Thus over a course of hours, I‘ve accumulated a lot of material to analyze. In the first case, gmail.com recognized the suppressed image in the message body. In the second, it had to double-check the contained link and determine that the image was located at the destination address.
A statistical recap:
– I sent a total of 220 emails to recipients on gmail.com. 90 of them contained the suppressed image or a link to the posting where it was used.
– Of the emails with the image or link, 27 were undeliverable.
– All emails without the image or link, including those to “undeliverable” addresses, were delivered without issue.
Thus, the dependence of delivery on content is evident, but at the same time, gmail.com also delivered most of the emails with a link to my posting. So how is the decision actually made?
I sent out the notification in five batch emails. So I listed the recipients and marked those undelivered. In fact, the censorship affected only one of the five emails and consistently blocked all twenty gmail.com addresses contained. So apparently the censorship check is done randomly. If I add the original email with the picture, which just as consistently blocked all of the gmail.com addresses, only two, or one-third, of the six emails were censored. So if you get mail returned to a recipient on gmail.com with the reasoning that it doesn’t meet the authentication requirements, it will probably bypass censorship when resent.
If the reader is communicating with friends about topics that may contain a critical political charge, I can only recommend that he use a mail server other than gmail.com. Out of over a hundred servers, it is the only one I have encountered this behavior on.
After Twitter revelations, Rep. Comer says Google and Facebook need to be investigated for similar censorship collusion
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 18, 2022
Commenting on the recent Twitter Files’ revelation of the FBI’s constant communication with Twitter, including recommending account bans, Republican Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer said investigations should go beyond Twitter to Google and Facebook.
“The entire FBI needs to be dismantled, we need to start all over. We need to enact strict reforms, and there need to be checks and balances at the FBI,” Comer said, speaking to Tammy Bruce on Fox News’ Hannity. He added that fixing and holding the FBI accountable should start with the budget process, which is why he is against the push for an omnibus.
“My concern was that this was a rogue FBI employee or two…but what we found today is the FBI had its own ministry of propaganda,” Comer continued.
“This is serious. What else are they involved in at the FBI? The entire FBI needs to be dismantled. We need to start all over. We need to enact strict reforms and there need to be checks and balances at the FBI.”
Bruce then asked, “I trust, though, that you are going to expand this beyond Twitter. You mentioned Google, you mentioned, perhaps, Facebook… are you going to expand and include those platforms, which we also know, at least from Mark Zuckerberg, he too was contacted by the FBI. I think we only know a portion of that. Are you going to expand this investigation?”
The Republican lawmaker, set to chair the Oversight Committee starting in January, replied: “Yes. This is going to take several committees focusing a lot of attention. Big tech is going to be a priority for the Republican majority…”
He added that “the FBI was involved in censorship… they have stepped in where the government does not belong. And this has to end. People have to be held accountable and we’re going to have to start with the budget, that’s what is so frustrating about what’s going on right now in Washington.”
YouTube censors RT Balkans
RT | December 6, 2022
YouTube, the Google-owned video platform has blocked the channel of Belgrade-based RT Balkans. No explanation was given for Monday’s move, which came about three weeks after the launch of the Serbian-language outlet in a region saturated by Western media coverage.
RT Balkans reported the ban on Monday evening, pointing out that the most recent video posted on the channel was their interview with the Russian ambassador to Serbia, Aleksandr Botsan-Kharchenko.
“Why are owners of the Western media space so afraid of RT’s Serbian-language reporting?” the outlet asked. “Their move mainly speaks about the lack of media freedom in the West, especially since the posts on your YouTube channel in no way violated the company’s rules of conduct.”
The Serbian-language news site was launched on November 15, with plans to begin TV broadcasts by 2024. It was able to open a YouTube account and post content even though the Google-owned platform had previously banned all “Russian” media.
Enacted in March, the ban followed demands by the EU to block RT and Sputnik channels in the bloc’s territory. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in May, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki explained the platform had created a new policy regarding “verified violent events,” which puts “denial or trivialization” of the conflict in Ukraine in the same category as denying the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, YouTube continued to operate in Russia so that its citizens could have access to “independent news,” she said, adding that one of the lessons of the conflict in Ukraine is that “information can be weaponized.”
RT sued YouTube in May. In October, an arbitration court in Moscow ruled that video platform must unblock RT’s accounts or face a daily fine of 100,000 rubles ($1,694), doubling every week. The same court had frozen Google’s assets in Russia, valued at 500 million rubles ($8.4 million), to ensure the verdict could be enforced.
Musk Promises to Make ‘Alternative Phone’ If Twitter Gets Removed From App Stores
Samizdat – 26.11.2022
WASHINGTON – Twitter’s new owner, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, says he will create a new smartphone if the social network is removed from the Apple and Google app stores.
“I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone,” Musk tweeted on Friday, in response to a user’s suggestion that Musk should produce his own phone instead of the “biased, snooping iPhone and Android,” if the Twitter app becomes unavailable on them.
On October 28, Musk finalized the acquisition of Twitter, which cost him $44 billion. Following the takeover, Musk changed the company’s day-to-day operations, including the termination of Twitter’s executives, who were responsible for the platform’s privacy and cybersecurity, as well as regular Twitter employees. The significant policy changes have caused a wave of concern.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing market research data, that more than one-third of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers had stopped putting ads on the social media platform in the two weeks following Musk’s takeover of the company.
Earlier this month, Twitter unblocked former US President Donald Trump’s account, banned after the January 6, 2021 events at the US Capitol, as the majority of participants in a survey conducted by Musk voted in favor of the measure.
Musk has promised that Twitter will reinstate blocked accounts after the majority of users voted for “general amnesty.”
RT wins court case against Google
Samizdat | October 4, 2022
Google has been ordered by Moscow’s arbitration court to restore RT’s YouTube channels, which were blocked by the tech giant following the launch of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.
The decision was announced on Tuesday as the court found in favor of ANO TV-Novosti, RT’s founding company, against Google LLC, Google Ireland Limited and the Russian Google division. They have been ordered to restore access to some 27 blocked channels.
If they fail to do so, a court penalty of 100,000 rubles per day ($1,694) will be imposed on Google until access to all of the channels is restored. Every week, the amount of the daily penalty will double.
Google now has 30 days to appeal the court’s verdict.
The lawsuit against Google was filed back in May when the court, at RT’s request, took interim measures to “make sure it is possible to enforce the judicial act” against the company and seized all financial assets and movable and immovable property of the tech giant’s Russian division to the value of 500 million rubles ($8.4 million).
Similar amounts have also been seized from the company in two other pending lawsuits filed by Russian television companies NTV and the GPM Entertainment Television, which have also had their content blocked on YouTube.
YouTube administrators restricted access to all RT and RTD channels in early March, shortly after Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine.
According to a March report from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media watchdog, there have been some 54 cases of YouTube restricting content belonging to Russian channels.
Following the launch of Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine, Western governments and private tech companies began a censorship campaign against Russian media they deem to be ‘state-controlled’. The European Union completely banned RT and Sputnik from its airwaves. RT America was forced to cease operations amid US sanctions on Moscow, while Google removed RT’s and Sputnik’s apps from its Play Store, and YouTube blocked access to all of the broadcasters’ channels.
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From the Archives
Swine Flu Didn’t Fly
By Niko Kyriakou | January 27, 2010
For makers of the swine flu vaccine, 2009 was a year to remember. By June, CSL Limited’s annual profits had risen 63 percent over 2008. GlaxoSmithKine’s 2009 earnings spiked 30 percent in the third quarter alone, to $2.19 billion. Roche made a stunning 12 times more in the second quarter of 2009 than of 2008. But in 2010, drug companies may get their comeuppance.
On Tuesday, the Council of Europe launched an investigation into whether the World Health Organization “faked” the swine flu pandemic to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers. The inquiry, held in Strasbourg, France, vindicates a worldwide movement of insiders, experts, and elected officials who accuse the United Nations organization of misleading the world into buying millions of unnecessary vaccines.
“I have never heard such a worldwide echo to a health political action,” Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an epidemiologist who formerly led the health committee for the Council of Europe, said at Tuesday’s hearing.
Dr. Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, hammered his own organization and WHO’s flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda, for “producing angst campaigns”.
“With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don’t we learn from history?” Keil said. “It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.” … continue
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Aletho News- Judge finds Australian war hero to be a war criminal
- CHD Scientists Call for Investigation Into CDC, FDA for Suppressing Evidence Linking COVID Shots and Myocarditis
- Vaccinated Veterans MORE Likely to Die from COVID, VA Study Proves
- Occurrence of Convulsions and Death After DTP Childhood Vaccination
- THE DURHAM REPORT, THE SPYGATE AND THE INEXTRICABLE TIE WITH THE ITALIAN DEEP STATE
- Europe’s Digital Services Act Puts Free Speech at the Mercy of Eurocrats
- The climate scaremongers: BBC Verify should investigate the BBC
- EU’s Green Deal to have dire implications for East African farmers — study
- US Companies Knew ‘Forever Chemicals’ Health Risks From the Start – Report
- Western weapons used in Ukrainian raid inside Russia – WaPo
- If Americans Knew
- New 3rd political party “No Labels” seeks middle ground – except on Israel
- Is the United States Moving Its Capital to Jerusalem?
- NYT downplays Palestinian civilian deaths, political motivation for Gaza attack
- What is behind the latest Israel-Gaza violence?
- What’s standing in the way of an Israel-Gaza ceasefire? Israel wants to keep breaking int’l law
- Israeli Missiles Kill Eight Palestinians, Including A Child, In Gaza
- Israel closes Gaza crossings; possible serious deterioration of humanitarian conditions
- Israel has killed 20 journalists with impunity since 2000
- Israel attacks Gaza, killing 15 Palestinians, including women and children
- Khader Adnan’s death & Israel’s decades of despotic military orders
- Brownstone Institute
- How the Medical Industry Burned Its Trust Capital
- Discovery Is the Covid Regime’s Greatest Fear
- One Health: Subverted, Corrupted, and Ruined
- The High Cost of Shattering Sensible Boundaries
- 3/16: The Day That Will Live in Infamy
- What and Why is ‘Woke?’
- New CDC Director Is Another Lockdowner
- An Ideology and Agenda of Estrangement
- The Fraying of the Liberal International Order
- A Myth-Making Toolkit from the Volcano’s Shadow
- Richie Allen
- UK Health Security Agency Launches High Temperature Alert System
- Free Speech Champion Vows To Defend All Views
- Pesticide Firms Hid Brain Toxicity Studies From EU Regulators
- Schoolgirl With Terminal Cancer Was Told It Might Be Stress
- Amazon to Pay $25 Million Over Alexa Privacy Violations
- Labour Would Force Landowners To Sell Below Market Value To Boost Housebuilding
- Couple Fear Wedding Cancellation If Hotel Is Used To House 300 Asylum Seekers
- Scores Of Primary Schools At Risk Of Closure Due To Birth Rate Decline
- Sunak Backs Feminist In Oxford Free Speech Row
- Top Chinese Scientist Won’t Rule Out Covid Lab Leak
- Not A Lot Of People Know That
- The Wider System Costs Of Renewable Energy
- Britain’s paralysis will allow China to obliterate our lead in renewable power–Ben Marlow
- Porthmadog Weather Station
- Climate Change Fears of Teen Activist Are Empirically Baseless
- England Needs A National Strategy For Sunny Weather!
- Met Office To Issue Sunny Day Alerts
- New study reveals Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km2 from 2009-2019
- Met Office Announce Water Scarcity Alert After Wet Spring!
- Ireland’s mooted cow massacre is a warning to net zero Britain
- Dominic Lawson: Lower tax revenue and higher CO2 emissions: What Starmer’s financially illiterate plan to stop North Sea drilling would really mean for Britain
- No Tricks Zone
- Surprise: Hurricane Activity Reconstructions Show Greater Storm Frequency When Globe Was Cold
- Germany Mean Temperature Trend For The Month Of May Sees No Rise Since 1986
- Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ Glacier Narrative Collapses…Total Melt Raises Sea Levels 1-2 mm, Not 3048 mm
- Expert Prof. Gerd Ganteför Calls For More Studies On The Regional Climate Impact By Wind Turbines
- New Study Destroys ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Narrative…Today’s Ice 8 Times 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑟 Than Last 8000 Years
- Cold Grips Globally: Alaska’s 4th Cold Winter… Record Cold Down Under…UK’s Delayed Spring…
- Aarhus University Researchers Find Arctic Warmer, Ice-Free In Summertime 10,000 Years Ago!
- Professors: The Entire Fossil Fuel Industry Must Be ‘Euthanized’ To Save Humanity From Warmth
- German Green Parliamentarian Shocks The Nation…Couldn’t Even Name First German Empire Chancellor!
- Another New Study Shows The Siberian Arctic Is Warmer When CO2 Is Low And Colder As CO2 Rises
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