MSNBC CENSORS SANDERS CONDEMNING TPP

Kit Daniels | Infowars - FEBRUARY 23, 2016

IMAGE CREDITS: GAGE SKIDMORE / FLICKR.

MSNBC cut away from live coverage of a Bernie Sanders press conference once he began to condemn the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Social media exploded as a result as viewers felt the break in Monday’s coverage was due to MSNBC’s owner, Comcast, not wanting to air criticism of the TPP because it benefits greatly from the treaty.

Scroll to the 1:40 mark.

“Of the near $16 million Comcast spent lobbying politicians in 2015, $40,000 alone was spent in the first three months of the year targeting the Senate and House of Representatives on issues relating to TPP,” RTreported. “Over an 18-month period between 2013 and 2015, Media Matters found that MSNBC only discussed TPP twice, with the exception of Ed Schultz, who discussed the agreement during 71 broadcasts while he was still hosting The Ed Show for MSNBC.”

Schultz later left MSNBC for RT America.

MSNBC isn’t alone in suppressing TPP coverage; CBS, ABC and NBC also barely mentioned the treaty over an 18-month period despite the TPP’s severe implications on both the U.S. economy and global human trafficking.

For one thing, not long after the White House invited Thailand to join the TPP, the AP reported the country was relying on slave labor to ship shrimp to the U.S.

“For… 16 hours, No. 31 and his wife stood in the factory that owned them with their aching hands in ice water,” the AP revealed. “They ripped the guts, heads, tails and shells off shrimp bound for overseas markets, including grocery stores and all-you-can-eat buffets across the United States.”

“After being sold to the Gig Peeling Factory, they were at the mercy of their Thai bosses, trapped with nearly 100 other Burmese migrants.”

It’s unlikely Thailand’s billion-dollar slave industry would prevent it from joining the TPP considering that President Obama previously removed an anti-slavery provision from the treaty and also allowed Vietnam to join the partnership despite its flourishing slave trade.

Interestingly, Obama quietly removed the TPP’s anti-slavery clause at the same time he was attacking the Confederate flag as a “symbol of slavery” last summer.

Twitter Shadowbanning ‘Real and Happening Every Day’ Says Inside Source

Breitbart | by MILO YIANNOPOULOS | 16 Feb 2016

AP Photo/Isa Simsek, Zaman

Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech. His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.

According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

Our source was backed up by a senior editor at a major digital publisher, who told Breitbart that Twitter told him it deliberately whitelists and blacklists users. He added that he was afraid of the site’s power, noting that his tweets could disappear from users’ timelines if he got on the wrong side of the company.

Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.

For site owners, the ideal shadowban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadowbanned.

However, Twitter isn’t merely targeting spammers. For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.

Among the users complaining of shadowbans are sci-fi author and alt-right figurehead Vox Day, geek culture blogger “Daddy Warpig,” and the popular pro-Trump account Ricky Vaughn. League of Gamers founder and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, as well as adult actress and anti-censorship activist Mercedes Carrera, have also reported that their tweets are not appearing on the timelines of their followers.

The pattern of shadowban reports, which skews towards the alt-right, the populist right, and cultural libertarians, follows close on the heels of Twitter’s establishment of a “Trust and Safety Council” packed with left-wing advocacy groups, as well as Islamic research centre the Wahid Institute.

It also follows my prediction that Twitter would use its influence to interfere in the 2016 presidential election by muffling conservative voices on the platform.

For close to a year now, Breitbart has covered Twitter’s march towards political censorship. In May 2015 Allum Bokhari reported that the site had begun to experiment with shadowbans, ostensibly to protect users from abuse. Then, as now, it was suspected that “protecting users from abuse” was an excuse to implement a system that would later be used for political censorship.

With shadowbans now confirmed by an inside source, there is little room for doubt that the platform is intent on silencing conservatives. Furthermore, it has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for transparency, concealing its shadowbanning system from users and hiding its political bias behind a veneer of opposition to online abuse. (In reality, the site turns a blind eye to abuse from left-wingers.)

Users in search of a transparent, politically unbiased platform will soon have to find — or build — an alternative.

Google To Censor US Search Site For European Users

Forbes | Emma Woollacott | February 10, 2016

(Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)

Google is removing the loophole allowing European users to sidestep the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling that censors their search results.

After the European Court of Justice ruled two years ago that people could ask for search results to be removed if they contained inaccurate or ‘outdated’ information, Google attempted to strike a compromise.

It complied with the order – but only for European versions of its website. This meant that European users wanting to see uncensored results have only to log on to Google.com to get the unedited version; and plenty do.


This state of affairs, as you might imagine, isn’t good enough for the European authorities, and in September last year the French data protection authority, CNIL, ordered the company to start removing offending content from its sites worldwide.

And while the initial fine was set at just €300,000 – a drop in the ocean for a company with annual revenues of about $66 billion – Google was told this could rise to an extraordinary 5% of global operating costs under new data protection legislation set to come in next year.

And now, says Reuters, the company’s come up with another compromise: to censor non-European domains, but only when they’re being accessed from the country where the right to be forgotten request has been made.

For example, if a British citizen made a successful removal request, nobody accessing Google search from the UK would be able to see the removed item, whichever national version of Google they used. Anybody searching the same domain from outside the EU, meanwhile, would see the full list of results.

Twitter announces 'trust and safety' panel to police content

Washington Examiner | By RUDY TAKALA | 2/9/16 5:28 PM

Twitter on Tuesday announced the formation of a new “Trust and Safety Council,” which will work to develop policies censoring speech on the site. The group will be comprised of more than 40 organizations from 13 regions around the world.

“With hundreds of millions of tweets sent per day, the volume of content on Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power,” Twitter said in a statement.

"It requires a multi-layered approach where each of our 320 million users has a part to play, as do the community of experts working for safety and free expression,” the statement added.

The announcement is the latest by Twitter in a string of moves aimed at improving its public image. Both the Obama administration and members of Congress have been calling on social media sites, and particularly Twitter, to do more to assist in the fight against terrorism. A California woman filed suit against Twitter in December, claiming that propaganda spread by the Islamic State on the site contributed to her husband’s shooting death in Jordan.

The latest move will contribute to combating violent speech on the site, but will likely expand Twitter’s effort to police content far beyond that as well. Groups involved with the council include the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Feminist Frequency, European Schoolnet, and the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism.

Twitter said it intended for the group to be comprised of “safety advocates, academics and researchers focused on minors, media literacy, digital citizenship, and efforts around greater compassion and empathy on the Internet,” and that it would provide input on the site’s “safety products, policies, and programs.”

“In developing the Council, we are taking a global and inclusive approach so that we can hear a diversity of voices,” Twitter explained. “As we develop products, policies, and programs, our Trust and Safety Council will help us tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly.”

Last week, the site also announced that it had silently removed as many as 125,000 accounts belonging to members of the Islamic State since the middle of 2015. And in December, Twitter amended its terms of service to more expressly prohibit abusive language.