More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers work for tech giant Meta, including its head of AI policy, who served in the IDF under an Israeli government scheme that allows non-Israelis to volunteer for the Israeli army.
Shira Anderson, an American international rights lawyer, is Meta’s AI policy chief who voluntarily enlisted for the IDF in 2009 under the program which enables non-Israeli Jews who aren’t eligible for military conscription to join the Israeli army.
Through this program, known as Garin Tzabar, many non-Israelis who have fought for the IDF have been implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity since Israel’s genocide of Gaza began in October 2023.
Anderson served as a non-commissioned officer in the IDF for over two years where she worked in the Military Strategic Information Section, writing dossiers and public relations propaganda. She was also the liaison between the IDF and foreign military attaches stationed in Israel, and liaison to the Red Cross.
With AI a critical emerging technology for tech giants and militaries, Anderson’s role at Meta is an important one. She develops the legal guidance, policies and public relations talking points concerning AI issues and regulation for all of Meta’s key areas, including its product, public policy and government affairs teams.
At Meta, Anderson, who is based in Meta’s Washington DC office, is in familiar company. More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers are employed by the company, my new investigation shows, many of whom worked for Israel’s spy agency Unit 8200.
These ex-IDF members are based evenly across Meta’s US offices and its Tel Aviv office, and a significant number of them, like Anderson, have a specialisation in AI. Given that Israel has made extensive use of AI not just to conduct its genocide, but to establish its prior system of apartheid, surveillance and occupation, Meta’s recruiting of IDF AI specialists is particularly insidious. Did these former Israeli spies use their Unit 8200 connections to help the tech giant collaborate with the IDF to build kill lists? According to a report last year, Unit 8200 infiltrated WhatsApp groups and marked every name in a group for assassination if just one alleged Hamas member was also in the group, no matter the size or content of the group chat.
How did Israel’s spy unit gain access to WhatsApp user data held by Meta?
Meta has serious, war crime-related questions to answer.
Questions that Anderson has no doubt drafted PR responses for.
Anderson has a long-standing allegiance to Israel. She joined the IDF after studying for a history degree at the University of California, Berkley, then completed a law degree at Duke University before returning to Israel where she worked for an Israeli thinktank run by the former head of the IDF. After this she became a legal assistant to the head of Israel’s Supreme Court. It was Israel’s Supreme Court that two weeks ago rejected a petition to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, effectively greenlighting the use of starvation as a weapon. This is a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
Anderson herself is a strident denier of the genocide. During a podcast appearance last year she said, “I absolutely do not think genocide is happening” and denied Israel was deliberately targeting civilians. During the interview she called Hamas “a death cult” and said “Gaza is a failed state,” despite it not being a state, the central fact that underlies Palestinian resistance. This is something you’d hope an international rights lawyer would know. She made numerous genocidal statements during the interview, including that “the challenge in the West Bank” is that “international law doesn’t permit Israel to do what it does in Gaza” because the West Bank is occupied. As a result, she lamented, “different rules apply.” She invoked the trolley problem to argue why killing large numbers of civilians is justifiable and appears from her time as IDF Red Cross liaison to have a particular grudge against the aid organisation, saying it “acts like a country” in Israel. You can hear it all here.
Anderson’s path to serve in the IDF, via the Garin Tzabar program, is also highly controversial. This initiative has enabled non-Israelis (known as ‘Lone Soldiers’) to join the IDF, murder Palestinians, commit war crimes, and then re-integrate into their home societies. Legal cases against Garin Tzabar volunteers who have returned to their homes after serving in the IDF are moving forward in a number of countries. In the UK evidence of war crimes committed in Gaza by ten Britons living in London has recently been submitted to London’s Metropolitan police.
How many possible war criminals are employed by Meta?
You can find the Tel Aviv-based Meta employee names here and here. You can find the names of the US-based employees and their locations here, here and here.
Some of the former Israeli spies now working for Meta spent significant amounts of time in Unit 8200, in some cases jumping straight from the IDF to Meta. Guy Shenkerman, for example, spent over a decade in Israel’s spy unit before moving to the US to join Meta in the summer of 2022. Miki Rothschild, a vice president of product management at Meta’s Sunnydale campus, spent three years during the second intifada as a commander of the IDF’s Moran Squad which controls long range missile strikes. Maksim Shmukler who works for Meta in Menlo Park and has also worked for Google and Apple, spent six and half years in Unit 8200 before moving to Texas.
Shenkerman, Rothschild and Shmukler are Israelis, while Shira Anderson volunteered to use her skills to launder the legalese that Israel relies on to whitewash genocide. The fact that the person who volunteered her professional services for an AI-powered apartheid state now helps determine how Meta will use our data to power an AI future should worry us all. It should especially concern us in light of America’s brutal crackdown on those who speak against genocide.
In November we saw Meta’s vision for this AI future when the company announced it was making its ‘Llama’ AI tools available to the US and its so-called ‘Five Eyes’ allies for national security applications. In the announcement Meta said it was “thrilled” to be working with America’s preeminent weapons manufacturers and national security state corporations including Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Anduril.
To recap. A former IDF officer is the head of AI policy for Meta, where she works alongside more than one hundred other former IDF and Israeli spies, and they are all now directly mobilised to work with America’s national security state apparatus and alongside a federal government disappearing and detaining dissidents who speak out against genocide.
The news that large numbers of former IDF members are employed by Meta comes after my investigations earlier this year revealed the former Unit 8200 AI specialists working on AI for big tech companies, and the former spies imported into Google via its acquisition of Wiz.
With the proliferation of former Israeli spies and solders into US big tech we are looking at the complete capture of the US national security state by pro-Israel voices. By voices who deny genocide as we watch journalists burn to death in tents. Who deny genocide as we watch headless babies carried aloft through the rubble and ruins of once vibrant streets. Voices who deny genocide as Israel’s highest court waves through starvation policies. By voices who, in Trump, appear to have found the ideal man to execute the Zionist wish-list.
As an AI future advances, the people who constructed the digital architecture enabling total surveillance and control of the Palestinians, and who wrote the code that enabled their genocide, are now determining that future for all of us.
The prospect is truly terrifying.
April 9, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Meta, Palestine, Unit 8200, United States, Zionism |
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Israel’s Unit 8200 is a secretive cyber warfare team that is said to be building the artificial intelligence (AI) systems that helped the regime commit the genocide against Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. According to a report, Unit 8200 is building AI systems for global tech and AI companies.
Former Unit 8200 members who specialize in AI, machine learning and big data are working for Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Open AI and Nvidia, which is an AI company determined to be the biggest in the world, the ¡Do Not Panic! website reported on Friday.
Former Unit 8200 spies specializing in AI are based worldwide, from San Francisco to New York, Spain to Switzerland, and London to Jerusalem al-Quds.
The report also said that AI leaders from Unit 8200 are now working for AI start-ups or heralded by corporate media as the next generation of AI.
The report revealed that most of these AI people have expressed support for Israel’s genocidal war against the people in Gaza. It was also exposed that not a single person from these people ever voiced opposition to Israel’s mass murder in Gaza.
Advocacy groups have also said AI and machine learning is central to the architecture of occupation and apartheid established before the genocidal Gaza campaign, from the use of facial recognition technology, and AI-directed guns at checkpoints, to spy apps known as ‘Blue Wolf’ and ‘Red Wolf’.
According to another report published in November last year, Israel has been employing an AI firing system jointly manufactured by an Indian arms company during its genocide in Gaza.
Citing documents and news reports, the Middle East Eye (MEE) news portal reported on November 20 that the occupation forces have been using the Arbel system since the beginning of the Israeli regime’s bloody war on Gaza.
Arbel was unveiled at a defense expo in Gandhinagar in the Indian state of Gujarat in October 2022 as a co-venture between Israeli Weapons Industries (IWI) company and India’s Adani Defense & Aerospace.
At the time, several Indian media described it as “India’s first AI-based firing system.”
In April 2024, IWI introduced Aber as a new “computerized small arms system” designed to increase combat lethality.
India, which is the largest purchaser of Israeli weapons, has in recent years become a major co-producer of Israeli weapons.
Israel unleashed its bloody Gaza onslaught on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas resistance group carried out its historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 46,788 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 110,453 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
January 17, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Amazon, Apple, Google, Human rights, Israel, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palestine, Unit 8200, United States, Zionism |
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It’s been more than two weeks since Bashir Biazar, an acclaimed Iranian musician and filmmaker, was arrested and imprisoned in France over charges widely described as politically motivated.
In a chargesheet filed by the French interior ministry, a copy of which is in the possession of Press TV, Biazar is accused of “Iranian propaganda,” “anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism,” “hateful social media posts,” being a “vector of hatred,” and posing a “threat to public order in France.”
Human rights activists, officials, and Biazar’s family and friends have categorically rejected the charges as baseless and driven by the French government’s political motives against the Islamic Republic.
A detailed examination of the charges and Biazar’s social media activities, especially in recent months, makes it clear that the case against him is not based on merit but is politically motivated.
Born and raised in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Biazar is an independent music composer and filmmaker internationally acclaimed for his work.
He has previously served as managing director of the New Horizon Institute of Arts and Culture and was the secretary of the London-based Islamic Student Association.
For many years, he also worked as a production manager at the Music and Song Department of IRIB, Iran’s state broadcaster, and was behind many acclaimed works produced by the organization.
French indictment against Biazar
The French interior ministry accuses Biazar of disseminating alleged Iranian “state propaganda” and promoting “anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism,” which they view as “political-religious interference.”
It also claims that Biazar has “an operational mission to act against Iranian opponents, Jewish, and Israeli targets,” in France and thus represents “a threat to the country’s integrity and security, as well as its international relations.”
The most serious accusations are that he “incites terrorism with hatred,” is involved in “hateful posts on social networks,” “supports Hamas and Hezbollah,” and “smears France.”
French authorities further describe Biazar as “a vector of hatred that seriously threatens public order and fundamental interests of the state,” recommending his expulsion from the country.
His case is cited as “an absolute emergency,” with France believing that his “hostile activities” are damaging the international situation, likely fueling tension, hatred, and violence between communities in the country.
Le Point, a major French weekly political news magazine, recently reported that the ministerial expulsion order was signed on May 22, two weeks before his arrest and imprisonment.
A French court reportedly ordered Biazar to leave the country within 28 days, but French police have not released him, providing no explanation for the continued detention.
False accusations of undermining France
Since his arrest, many commentators, officials, and Biazar’s family and associates have condemned the French indictment and charges against him, terming them baseless and politically motivated.
A close examination of his activities on various social media networks, particularly the X platform (formerly Twitter), reveals the unfounded nature of the charges leveled against him.
Biazar used X for 13 years before his profile was deleted in 2022 “without explanation, warning, and reason.” After that, he created another account on X where he is active now.
He has also been using Instagram to a much lesser extent, leaving only 43 posts on the network.
Instagram, a Meta-affiliated network, has strict rules against pro-Palestinian resistance movements, leading to many pro-Palestine voices being blocked or suspended.
The fact that Biazar’s profile was not deleted or suspended proves he has not broken any rules.
All his social media posts, comments, and tags—whether on X or Instagram—are written in Persian, indicating they are not intended for a French audience.
According to Press TV analysis and examination of his social media activities, no French person follows him, and no French citizen has ever interacted with his posts.
His social media activities, like millions of pro-Palestine advocates around the world, including in France, have primarily focused on the unfolding Israeli genocide in Gaza since October last year.
Voice against Gaza genocide
Biazar, like other conscientious pro-Palestine campaigners, has raised his voice against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of 37,400 Palestinians, most of them children and women.
The pinned post on Biazar’s X handle features a video of him addressing a United Nations session on anti-Iran sanctions, Israeli actions in Gaza, and the world body’s passivity.
“The Zionists have never been so alone, hated, defeated, and humiliated,” he wrote in the tweet.
In a tweet on May 28, Biazar criticized the silence of French President Emmanuel Macron, CNN, and the BBC on Israeli crimes in Gaza, particularly the massacre in southern Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp.
He also posted about anti-Iran elements in London, holding an Israeli flag, and harassing an Iranian woman who was heading to a memorial ceremony.
Some of his tweets showed the massive gathering in different Iranian cities paying tribute to late Iranian president Ebrahim Raeisi and his companions martyred in a helicopter crash.
But, most of his social media activities in recent months were wholly concentrated on the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the Western silence and complicity in it.
In a tweet on May 9, he shared a video clip of the Piers Morgan show in which an Israeli regime spokesman was not able to defend the crimes of the regime against Palestinians.
On October 27, 2023, he criticized the French police’s decision to cancel a permit for a public gathering in support of the Palestinian people and declare it illegal.
Some of his tweets were also dedicated to the US campus movement and police violence against students, like millions of other netizens tweeting about the same.
Biazar commented on French internal security affairs only once, on May 10, comparing adolescent violence during anti-government protests in France to West-backed Iranian riots.
Biazar stated that controlling teenagers during social unrest is the primary responsibility of their parents, aligning with the French Ministry of Justice’s decision last July.
French Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti said parents who neglect their children under 17 and leave them out at night could face two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros.
Biazar emphasized that just two days after this statement, the protests over the police killing of Nahel Merzouk were extinguished completely.
False accusations about resistance movements
Since the Israeli genocide on Gaza began on October 7 last year, Biazar has posted hundreds of tweets about Palestine, the suffering of Palestinians, and criticism of the Israeli regime and Western governments’ indifference, similar to what many French and Western citizens do regularly.
Among these tweets, only nine have mentioned the Gaza-based resistance movement Hamas, all in Persian. Seven were replies to other comments, achieving limited reach.
The two direct tweets commented on videos of Khaled Mashal and Israeli military commander Gadi Eisenkot discussing the impact of Hamas operations.
In reply comments, Biazar criticized media manipulations about Hamas and mentioned their operations’ goals. He stated that Hamas operates in the occupied territories according to UN resolutions and noted the scale of Israeli brutality in Gaza.
Biazar has not commented on Hezbollah in recent months, except for a single comment on a speech by its leader, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, criticizing media manipulation of his words.
He has never published material that could indirectly link him to the charges, such as videos of Palestinian resistance groups’ military operations.
#FreeBashir campaign growing louder
The campaign to release Biazar from French captivity has been growing louder and bigger in recent days, with many journalists, activists, artists, and academics joining it.
Richard Medhurst, a British journalist, called his arrest and imprisonment “outrageous” in a post on X.
“French police summoned an Iranian musician on June 4 with no explanation, immediately arrested him for ‘supporting terrorism,’ and drove him 100 km to a camp meant for illegal immigrants. This is purely political and ridiculous,” wrote Medhurst.
Ramy Abdu, the chairman of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, shared an article on X stating that Biazar “has been languishing in a French prison for almost two weeks following his arbitrary arrest for pro-Palestinian activism.”
Tim Anderson, an Australian academic and writer, said the Macron regime in France has jailed the Iranian musician “for pro-Palestinian activism.”
Marwa Osman, a Lebanese journalist and TV host, asked if Macron had taken the Iranian national “hostage” to “release his agents whom he sent to spy on Iran in 2022.”
“This is how #France is going to play it now? Well, I’d say this is one risky game Macron is playing. Because you know, two can play the same game… always,” she wrote on X.
June 19, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | France, Human rights, Instagram, Israel, Meta, Palestine, Zionism |
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Brigadier-General Oleksii Hromov, Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (Photo by Vladimir Shtanko/Anadolu Agency)
A “sprawling constellation” of supposedly independent organizations and fact-checkers bankrolled by Washington has been behind labeling Americans who disagree with Kiev Russian propagandists, according to an investigation published on Thursday.
Journalist Lee Fang and RealClearInvestigations have looked into outfits such as New Voice of Ukraine, VoxUkraine, Detector Media and others, finding that in many cases they “promoted aggressive messages that stray from traditional journalistic practices” to support the Ukrainian government and “delegitimize its critics,” both at home and abroad.
Americans they have gone after range from economist Jeffrey Sachs and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer to journalists Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald. Some of these outfits have also denounced a factually correct New York Times article about the battle of Avdeevka as a “Russian psyop” and “disinformation.”
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have funded scores of Ukrainian organizations. Some of them act as fact-checking partners for Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms, helping Ukraine censor critics under the guise of fighting “Russian disinformation.”
The London-based Zinc Network has been paid by USAID to “undermine Kremlin information operations” and help Ukraine with its own “strategic communications.”
According to another investigative journalist, Jack Poulson, Zinc’s Open Information Partnership in Ukraine has defined disinformation as “verifiable information which is unbalanced or skewed, amplifies, or exaggerates certain elements for effect, or uses emotive or inflammatory language to achieve effects which fit within existing Kremlin narratives, aims, or activities.”
Asked about the “anti-disinformation” groups in Ukraine targeting Americans, the State Department told Fang and RealClear that it “provides funding to credible independent media organizations to strengthen democracies in the countries we work in around the world.”
“We do not control the editorial content of these organizations,” the State Department insisted. According to documents Fang has reviewed, however, the US government and its contractors have “directly set the agenda” for Ukrainian outlets.
The US is “an active participant” in the information war between Russia and Ukraine, George Beebe, a director with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Fang. “The US government has been trying to shape perceptions, and it’s very difficult to separate what’s intended for foreign audiences from what seeps into the Anglosphere media,” he added.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has accused Russia of influencing US lawmakers and society at large. While he has offered little evidence for his claims, Fang’s investigation has revealed that much of the content generated by US-funded Ukrainian outlets “explicitly targets American foreign policy discourse.”
April 11, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Meta, NED, Ukraine, United States, USAID |
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The Netherlands seems like a “land of the free” to some from the outside – at the very least, you are allowed to freely use narcotics still banned in most countries around the world.
So help yourself to that addiction – but if your “addiction” is to speak your mind, be “defamatory” (or accused of that online), and hope to remain anonymous – good luck.
Why people still use Facebook is up to them – but if they do, what the company is doing in this European country should dissuade them once and for all, if they have any notion of being anonymous online.
Sure, you can use a “nickname” – but if somebody wants to know who you are in the physical world, and have the habit of posting on Facebook – then those who want to know your actual name and address will get it from Facebook (Meta).
That’s the long and the short of a ruling of a Dutch court that ordered Facebook (specifically its European operation based in Ireland) to unmask a user, accused of “manipulating and making secret recordings of women he dated.”
Just like the “think of the children!” trope – this kind of justification is what most sane persons can get behind immediately. Fine – stop this guy – but then, where does it actually stop? For every other user, in a myriad other scenarios?
For the moment, that big picture perspective is what we don’t have from media reports. Instead, we know what the particular case, that could pave the way for a precedent of untold proportions, is about.
There are people in the world who go to Facebook to discuss their “dating experiences,” and the user, whose real identity has now been ordered to be “damasked,” was one of those. The comments the user posted appeared on “at least” two private groups on the platform.
The “subject” of these posts naturally disliked it, claiming reputation harm, but Facebook was not so sure. “It is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation,” is how the giant had put it.
Next, the claimant was told that perhaps, the issue should be resolved privately (this doesn’t seem to be a case of “revenge porn” or anything on that magnitude).
But then, the lawsuit came, despite Meta apparently “defending the anonymous user’s right to freedom of expression.”
And now, the court “ordered Meta to provide ‘basic subscriber information’ on the anonymous user, including their username, as well as any names, email addresses, or phone numbers associated with their Facebook account’,” – but not to remove the posts, “or flag any others that may have been shared in private groups,” say reports.
The cherry on the court order’s cake:
“According to settled case law, under certain circumstances Meta has an obligation to provide identifying data, even if the content of the relevant messages is not unmistakably unlawful.”
August 5, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Facebook, Meta, Netherlands |
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‘Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other tech giants use the H-1B visa program as a source of cheap labor’
Mere months after record layoffs, a trade group representing Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other technology giants is pressuring President Joe Biden’s administration to allow more temporary foreign workers to work in the United States through the H-1B visa program for people with specialized skills.
The latest data showing surging applications for the visas “makes clear that there is not enough H-1B visas authorized by Congress to meet U.S. employer demand,” Compete America, a group that represents Silicon Valley firms on immigration policy issues, argued in a June 1 letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The letter calls for changes designed to expedite and streamline the visa application process. In the appeal to Mayorkas, Compete America claims that the current annual H-1B visa cap of 85,000 “remains insufficient to meet the needs of our economy.”
Metadata from the letter shows that it was edited by multiple tech attorneys, including Barbara Leen, an immigration attorney for Microsoft. Peter Schiron, an assistant general counsel and immigration advisor at Deloitte, a consulting firm that advises corporate interests on outsourcing strategy, also participated in the editing process.
The letter was also organized by TechNet and the Information Technology Industry Council, two lobbying groups that also represent Silicon Valley interests.
Earlier this year, the same firms demanding more access to foreign labor laid off tens of thousands of American workers. Microsoft laid off over 10,000 employees. Google laid off 12,000 employees. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, laid off 21,000 employees. Amazon laid off 27,000 employees. And Salesforce announced a 10% reduction in its workforce, a cut estimated to affect about 8,000 people.
In a number of cases, those same companies appear to have swiftly replaced the workers they terminated with recipients of H-1B visas. As I previously reported on this Substack, Amazon, Google, and other firms applied for special foreign worker visas in February and March, just weeks after announcing layoffs. Records released by the Department of Labor show that those firms received approval from the Biden administration to hire H-1B visa recipients for computer engineering, programming, and design roles.
But the tech giants complain that even the current number of visas that the federal government awards them is insufficient. Currently, the law allows for 65,000 new H1-B visas per year, along with 20,000 visas for individuals with a master’s degree or higher. Firms may apply to renew the visas. As many as 600,000 foreign workers currently work at U.S. firms through the program.
Compete America has likewise long played a controversial role in advocating for more foreign visas on behalf of major technology companies such as Microsoft and Facebook. The organization, which dates to 1996 and was originally called American Business for Legal Immigration, has pushed for expanded foreign visas in nearly every major immigration overhaul.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, testified in 2008 before Congress on the issue, demanding a dramatic increase in the H-1B visa cap. Facebook, which paid to settle charges that it violated immigration law by discriminating against American workers in favor of H-1B visa holders, has similarly made the visas a central demand among its lobbyists.
Research suggests that these tech companies favor the program because it saves them money, rather than because it fills an otherwise unfillable labor gap. Although the H-1B visa program bolsters corporate profits, the use of foreign workers in the tech industry has depressed wages by as much as 10.8%.
The H-1B program began in 1990 to deal with labor shortages in high-tech industries. But there is evidence that companies have begun to rely on it to reduce labor costs. Despite a provision of the H-1B visa program statute that requires the use of foreign workers only when qualified Americans are not available, corporations routinely fail to comply with that requirement.
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that receives some funding from labor unions, has documented major corporations’ widespread abuse of the H-1B visa program, including systematic underpayment of foreign workers under the program.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook take advantage of the foreign worker program “in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” EPI experts wrote in a May 2020 report on the topic.
Those practices continue to the present day, according to EPI. “Rather than turning to the H-1B program as a last resort when U.S. workers cannot be found, most employers hire H-1B workers because they can be underpaid and are de facto indentured to the employer,” the think tank wrote on its website in April.
Companies are keen to exploit the H-1B visa program because of the power it gives them over a subset of highly skilled workers. Foreign nationals working in the United States on an H-1B visa retain legal status in the U.S. tied to employment, making it nearly impossible for them to bargain for better working conditions or higher pay.
Year after year, news reports emerge of businesses replacing American workers with H-1B visa recipients. In some cases, companies have instructed laid-off American workers to train their foreign visa-holder replacements.
In 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), led a bipartisan group of senators urging the Obama administration to crack down on corporations’ use of foreign visas to undercut American labor.
That year, Disney and Southern California Edison, a utility interest, had forced laid-off workers to train their foreign H-1B replacements.
“A number of U.S. employers, including some large, well-known publicly traded corporations, have reportedly laid off thousands of American workers and replaced them with H-1b visa holders,” the senators wrote in a letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder, then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, and then-Secretary of Labor Tom Perez. “To add insult to injury, many of the replaced American employees report that they have been forced to train the foreign workers who are taking their jobs.”
June 12, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics | Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, United States |
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The New York Times isn’t happy that Meta and Twitter may be scaling back their censorship of “election misinformation” during the 2022 US midterm elections.
Before the 2020 US presidential election, Big Tech platforms deployed unprecedented levels of censorship by censoring then-President Donald Trump numerous times, banning popular pro-Trump groups, and more. Post-election, this mass censorship continued with President Trump being permanently banned by all the major tech platforms, discussions of “widespread fraud or errors” changing the 2020 US presidential election outcome being banned, free speech platform Parler (which many users had flocked to in an attempt to escape Big Tech’s censorship) being deplatformed by the tech giants, and more.
The mainstream media and Big Tech used the vague, subjective term “election misinformation” to justify this silencing of a sitting US President and the mass censorship of election-related speech.
But according to The New York Times, Meta’s election team, which censors election misinformation and had more than 300 people in 2020, has now been slashed to around 60 people. Additionally, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with the team regularly in 2020 but now the team meets with Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg instead of Zuckerberg.
Twitter employees also told The Times that the pending sale of the company to Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has resulted in it pulling back some of its focus on elections.
And civil rights groups complained to The New York Times that Zuckerberg no longer discusses efforts to thwart election misinformation with them like he did in 2020.
“I’m concerned,” President of the NAACP Derrick Johnson told The Times. “It appears to be out of sight, out of mind.”
In its article, The New York Times claims that this potential reduction in censorship at Meta “could have far-reaching consequences as faith in the U.S. electoral system reaches a brittle point” and laments that dozens of political candidates who are running for election in 2022 and believe that President Trump was robbed of the 2020 election are reaching American voters through social media platforms.
The Times also takes issue with the viral Dinesh D’Souza documentary “2000 Mules” reportedly getting more than 430,000 interactions Facebook and Instagram. These 430,000 interactions represent a fraction of the total views and interactions 2000 Mules has received on the alternative free speech platforms Rumble and Locals which hosted and provided censorship protection to the documentary. However, The Times points to these interactions as an example of election misinformation being “rampant online.”
While The New York Times fears that users and political candidates could be allowed to speak more freely about elections on Big Tech platforms in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Meta has responded by insisting that there will still be lots of censorship.
Meta spokesman Tom Reynolds disputed The Times’ assertion that 60 people focused on election integrity and said hundreds of people across more than 40 teams focus on election work. He added that with each election, Meta is “building teams and technologies and developing partnerships to take down manipulation campaigns, limit the spread of misinformation and maintain industry-leading transparency around political ads and pages.”
Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy also insisted that the company was continuing its efforts to “protect the integrity of election conversation” and noted that Twitter has labeled the accounts of political candidates for the midterms.
June 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Meta, New York Times, Twitter, United States |
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Big Tech giants are increasingly positioning themselves, and being positioned by politicians, as speech police. And ever-increasing crises are being used as a justification for it.
Despite the fact that Twitter’s attempts to police inauthentic activity regarding the conflict have already gone awry, and it’s almost always independent journalists that suffer the most, politicians are demanding more.
Virginia’s Sen. Mark Warner has written to all major social media companies, urging them to make efforts to become the police of misinformation on social media with regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In the letter to Alphabet, Meta, Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, and Telegram, Warner urged the companies to increase their efforts to stop the spread of “harmful misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and a wide range of scams and frauds that opportunistically exploit confusion, desperation, and grief.”
We obtained a copy of the letters for you here: Meta, Twitter, Google, Reddit, TikTok, Telegram
Warner asked the companies to look out for “malign influence activity related to the conflict,” and increase resources to identify fake accounts. He also suggested the establishment of reporting channels where experts can share credible information.
In the letter to Alphabet, which owns YouTube and Google, Warner asked the company to stop monetizing content “publicly attributed to have associations with Russian influence activity.”
He claimed that his staff identified TASS, Sputnik, and RT as having content “specifically focused on the Ukraine conflict to be monetized with YouTube ads – including, somewhat perversely, an ad by a major U.S. government contractor.”
“As one of the world’s largest communications platforms, your company has a clear responsibility to ensure that your products are not used to facilitate human rights abuses, undermine humanitarian and emergency service responses, or advance harmful disinformation,” Warner wrote.
The senator encouraged the companies to figure out how they will ensure Ukrainians get emergency communications. Warner also warned about the accounts of Ukrainian authorities and humanitarian groups being hacked.
February 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | Google, Meta, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube |
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Truckers in France are reportedly planning to emulate the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ by mobilizing groups of big rigs to protest vaccine mandates and other Covid-19 restrictions set by Paris. According to a BFM TV report, demonstrators plan to “paralyze” the French capital next week before joining a wider “European convergence” in Brussels.
The outlet reported that a leaflet announcing the ‘Freedom Convoy France’ has been circulated on social media networks, calling on “citizens” to “recover their freedom, their fundamental rights, unconditional access to care, education, and culture, respect for the essential values of our Constitution.” It also noted that the truckers in “Canada [had] paved the way for us.”
After final preparations on Monday and Tuesday, the convoy will set off in three waves from across France – with those furthest from Paris setting off on Wednesday, according to an itinerary on the leaflet. All three waves are expected to reach the national capital Friday evening. On Sunday, the convoy is slated to leave and “join our European friends” in Brussels.
The BFM TV report noted that a Facebook group, called ‘Le convoi de la liberte’, had been created on January 26 and reached nearly 197,000 members. The outlet said the convoy may reinvigorate protests against vaccination passes, which have apparently been flagging [???] in recent weeks.
In addition, the report pointed to a ‘World Freedom Convoy’ group that has been set up on Telegram. This is thought to include demonstrators from Germany, Italy, and Croatia, among others. The Bruzz news outlet in Belgium reported on Thursday that some 40,000 people had joined the group within the past week – with the focus on free speech and the right to make one’s own health choices.
According to Bruzz news, the truck drivers hope to head toward their respective capital cities starting Monday before heading on to Brussels. The outlet noted that it was unclear how many would actually take part, but added that police were monitoring the situation.
Meanwhile, The Guardian reported that a Facebook group of US truckers called ‘Convoy to DC 2022’, who planned to drive to Washington, DC next month, had gained more than 100,000 members before being deleted by Meta. The organizers have reportedly since moved to Telegram, where over 28,000 have joined.
February 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | COVID-19 Vaccine, European Union, France, Human rights, Meta |
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