A former insider who worked at YouTube / Google, Zach Vorhies shares his story about what he uncovered while working for the tech giant.
Zach Vorhies became a whistleblower after he discovered what he believed to be high crimes committed by Google against entire nations, including the United States.
Google sent the police after Zach when they discovered he had taken over 950 pages of documents from the company which he handed over to the Department of Justice.
Mr. Zorhies also shares a plan to end the censorship and possibly break up the monopoly that has become possibly the most powerful corporation in the world, Google.
President Trump on Thursday ramped up his war with social media companies by signing an executive order that aims to curtail their legal liability protections – two days after Twitter slapped fact check labels to a pair of his tweets about fraud in mail-in voting for the first time.
“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers it has faced in American history,” Trump said before signing the executive order in the Oval Office where Attorney General Bill Barr was present.
“A small handful of powerful social media monopolies,” Trump said, “had unchecked power to censure, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”
Trump declared, “We can’t let this continue to happen, it’s very, very unfair.”
The president added, “This censorship and bias is a threat to freedom itself. Imagine if your phone company silenced or edited your conversation. Social media companies have vastly more power in the United States than newspapers, they’re by far more rich than any other traditional forms of communication.”
Social media companies “that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield,” Trump vowed, adding that companies “like Twitter enjoy an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform — which they are not.”
“My executive order further instructed the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices,” said the commander in chief who at one point held up a copy of Thursday’s NY Post featuring a lead member of Twitter’s policing team who once called the president a “racist tangerine.”
Trump’s order directs federal agencies to look at whether they can place new regulations on the tech giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.
“There’s no precedent in American history for so small a number of corporations to control so large a sphere of human interaction,” said Trump who claimed that Twitter is making “editorial decisions.”
“As president, I’m not allowing the American people to be bullied by these giant corporations. Many people have wanted this to be done by presidents for a long time,” he said, adding, “I’ve been called by Democrats that want to do this and so I think you could possibly have a bipartisan situation.”
The order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 landmark federal law that largely exempts online platforms from legal liability for material posted by their users, allowing them to be treated more like publishers.
Rolling back those regulations would expose the tech companies to more civil liability thjrough lawsuits.
“Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people,” the order opens.
“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.”
It goes on to note, “Today, many Americans follow the news, stay in touch with friends and family, and share their views on current events through social media and other online platforms. As a result, these platforms function in many ways as a 21st century equivalent of the public square. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see.”
In a clear reference to Twitter’s fact check on Trump’s mail-in ballot tweets and Yoel Roth, the social media company’s executive who helped introduce the fact-check system earlier this month, the order says, “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet. As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets. Unsurprisingly, its officer in charge of so-called ‘Site Integrity’ has flaunted his political bias in his own tweets.
Barr said the order “sets up a rulemaking procedure that will eventually be under the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to try to get back to the original interpretation and understanding of Section 230.”
“It also empowers the Attorney General to work with state attorneys general to come up with model legislation that addresses this mistake,” Barr said. “And we’re preparing federal legislation, which we’ll be sending over shortly, for the consideration of the Office of Management budget.”
Barr noted that the order does not “repeal” Section 230.
“I’m not against Section 230 if it was properly applied, but it’s been stretched and I don’t know anyone on Capitol Hill who doesn’t agree that it’s been stretched beyond its original intention,” he said.
The attorney general said the law has been “completely stretched to allow it to become really behemoths who control a lot of the flow of information in our society to engage in censorship of that information and to act as editors and publishers of the material.”
Barr compared the censorship to that of “foreign governments like Communist China.”
The order also calls for a review of “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” by the social media companies and for the FCC to determine whether actions like the editing of content by the tech companies should lead to the firms forfeiting the protections under Section 230.
Trump’s executive order calls on the government to reassess whether federal online advertising dollars should be held back from the social media giants if they “restrict free speech.”
Legal experts argue that any effort to modify Section 230 would be hit with a court challenge and is likely unconstitutional.
And Trump said he predicts “they’ll be doing a lawsuit,” but did not specify further.
When asked by a reporter during the signing of the executive order whether Trump — a prolific tweeter with more than 80 million followers — will delete his account, the president said, “If you weren’t fake. I would do it in a heartbeat. If we had a fair press in this country, I would do that in a heartbeat. There’s nothing I’d rather do than get rid of my own Twitter account.”
Earlier in the day, ahead of the signing, Trump tweeted, “This will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!”
On Tuesday, Twitter attached warning links to two of Trump’s tweets in which the president claimed that allowing large scale mail-in voting would result in a “rigged election.”
“Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” the label on the tweets state, and redirects users to news articles and disputing that voting-by-mail would allow for rampant fraud.
Kejraj: They want to cancel or censor the truth? I guess you’re not the only one that knows some tricks!
Users of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp reported technical difficulties on Wednesday, ranging from photos that won’t load to full outages. Reports began rolling in around 8:45 a.m. EST, when thousands of Instagram users said they were having problems.
On Instagram – just like those other apps – the issues appear to be limited only to a specific part of the site. Users report that their feed might load, but that it is not possible to post anything new into it.
Doing so brings up an error message indicating that “Photo Can’t Be Posted”, according to users experiencing the problems. –Independent
The Facebook issues are hitting the Northeastern US and Europe particularly hard.
According to users on Downdetector, one user reported: “images not loading in Newsfeed, groups, profile pics, or thumbnails. Happening in three different browsers on Windows (Chrome, FF, Edge), and in two different browsers (Chrome and Samsung Native Browser) and the FB app on android. The news feed has been touchy since yesterday, but this is getting worse.”
After weaseling his way through a series of congressional hearings this past spring, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is back in the news following the revelation that his social media empire committed even more crimes with its mishandling of private user data. A bombshell cache of documents recently handed…
*Panama Papers leak leads to ‘largest protest’ in Iceland’s History Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, outraged by their Prime Minister’s alleged offshore accounts that were brought to light in the so-called Panama Papers. Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson reportedly failed to declare…
Facebook has once again found itself in the hot seat after a scathing investigation revealed the social media giant entered into secret deals giving their corporate partners access to more of its users’ personal data than previously admitted. In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress, “We don’t sell data to…
Published time: 9 May, 2019 14:45Edited time: 10 May, 2019 07:48
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has called for the break-up of the social media behemoth and lamented the “staggering” and “unchecked” power of CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a lengthy and searing oped.
Hughes co-founded Facebook with Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and watched “in awe” as the company grew over the last 15 years — but said he now feels a “sense of anger and responsibility” about how all-powerful and out-of-control the social media giant has become.
Lashing out at the company, Hughes wrote in a piece published by the New York Times that Zuckerberg’s power and influence goes “far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.”
“There is no precedent for [Zuckerberg’s] ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.”
Hughes berates Facebook over“sloppy privacy practices,” “violent rhetoric and fake news,” and the“unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention.” It’s not that Zuckerberg is a bad person, he writes, but “he’s human” and his focus on growth “led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks.”
Hughes also bemoans the fact that the powerful CEO controls three core communications platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and says that lack of competition, market or government regulation is a major problem. If a competitor crops up, Zuckerberg can simply choose to shut it down “by acquiring, blocking or copying it” in the manner it did with the Instagram and WhatsApp mergers.
The lack of competition means that“every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.”
“Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered.”
Hughes also worries that Zuckerberg has “surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.” He believes that neither Facebook’s offer to appoint a “privacy czar” or the expected Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fine of $5 billion will be enough to rein in the company.
The answer and solution lies in more government regulation and subsequent market competition, Hughes says. But Facebook isn’t afraid of just “a few more rules,” so the action needs to be more dramatic, he suggests.
“The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.”
That will involve separating Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram into three individual companies and banning future acquisitions “for several years.”
The FTC should never have permitted these mergers, but it’s “not too late to act.” There is “precedent for correcting bad decisions,” he says, pointing to 2009 when Whole Foods settled antitrust complaints by selling off the Wild Oats brand and stores it had acquired years earlier.
He notes that time is of the essence, however, as Facebook has been working quickly to integrate the three platforms, precisely in order to make splitting them up more difficult.
“Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American. It is time to break up Facebook.”
Hughes also suggests the creation of a new government agency specifically to empower Congress to regulate tech companies and protect user privacy.
He says the agency should “create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media” while noting that the idea might seem “un-American” at first. The standards therefore should be “subject to the review of the courts” and would be similar to already accepted rules on speech like not shouting “fire” in a theater, provoking violence or making false statements to manipulate stock prices.
Ultimately, he says, an aggressive case taken now against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to “think twice”about stifling competition out of fear that “they could be next.”
Reactions to Hughes’ op-ed on social media have been mixed, so far. Christopher Wylie, who blew the whistle on Facebook’s damaging Cambridge Analytica scandal, tweeted the op-ed in agreement, saying it was time to “break up Facebook like they broke up democracy.”
Many others reacted positively, too, saying the time is ripe to start regulating big tech — but some weren’t delighted by the prospect of regulations on speech.
(Update: In the video, we said Steven Crowder’s “livestream was dethrottled,” when in fact his entire page was “dethrottled.”)
(UPDATE 2: FACEBOOK RESPONDS “We fired this person a year ago for breaking multiple employment policies and using her contractor role at Facebook to perform a stunt for Project Veritas,” a spokesperson told The Verge. “Unsurprisingly, the claims she is making validate her agenda and ignore the processes we have in place to ensure Facebook remains a platform to give people a voice, regardless of their political ideology.”)
(Update 3: Project Veritas has included captions on original images in this article to avoid reader confusion.)
(San Francisco) Project Veritas has obtained and published documentsand presentation materials from a former Facebook insider. This information describes how Facebook engineers plan and go about policing political speech. Screenshots from a Facebook workstation show the specific technical actions taken against political figures, as well as “[e]xisting strategies” taken to combat political speech.
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said that to expose dishonesty and censorship in big tech companies, he will be relying upon more insiders, informants and leakers in the future:
“Our future depends on those who are willing to give up everything for what they believe.”
To gain a better understanding of the documents, Project Veritas spoke with the Facebook insider in an interview. The insider separated from Facebook in 2018 and was later hired by Project Veritas.
“I saw things that were going on that I personally found to be troubling.”
Image explanation created by Project Veritas
According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s page had been suppressed before in April 2016, and Crowder told Project Veritas they settled a dispute related to the issue with Facebook out of court. Asked for comment on this story, Steven Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond said:
“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”
A screenshot of an action log on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page provided by the insider, shows the tag. The insider believes that the “deboost” code suppresses the distribution of livestream videos on Facebook. Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.
When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just “make stuff up” about people through these systems. “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” said Cernovich.
The insider says that unlike many actions that Facebook content moderators can take against pages, the “deboost” action, which appears to occur algorithmically, does not notify the page’s owner. “[W]ith these ‘deboost live stream’ things, there was no warning sent to the user… These were actions that were being taken without the users knowing.”
Upon further review, the insider says she did not notice the tag on any left-wing pages. “I looked at the Young Turks’ page, I looked at Colin Kaepernick’s page, none of them had received the same deboost comment.”
The “deboost” tag appears after the word “Sigma,” which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts. Both Mike Cernovich and Steven Crowder cannot recall having ever produced any videos on Facebook that promote suicide or self-harm. Mike Cernovich told Project Veritas that in fact he has long spoken out against suicide and self-harm, and provided tweets of his and a blog post as evidence.
“They’re shifting the goal post”
Also in the in the documents was a presentation, authored by Facebook engineers Seiji Yamamoto and Eduardo Arino de la Rubia, titled “Coordinating Trolling on FB.” Yamamoto is a Data Science Manager, and de la Rubia is a Chief Data Scientist at Facebook. The presentation appears to describe the current actions, as well as potential future actions, Facebook can take to combat alleged abusive behavior on the platform.
Yamamoto, who is responsible for “News Feed Reduction Strategy,” also authored a post where he said Facebook should address “…quite a bit of content near the perimeter of hate speech.” Said the Facebook insider, the “perimeter of hate speech” means “things that aren’t actually hate speech but that might offend somebody. Anything that is perceived as hateful but no court would define it as hate speech.”
The insider believes Yamamoto’s plans appears to be political in nature, rather than in response to abusive behaviors, “[i]t was clearly kind of designed… aimed to be the right wing meme culture that’s become extremely prevalent in the past few years. And some of the words that appeared on there were, using words like SJW… MSM… the New York Times doesn’t talk about the MSM. The independent conservative outlets are using that language.”
Also in Yamamoto’s report was a line appearing to say that online Facebook trolls are involved in “destructive behaviors” such as “[r]ed-pilling normies to convert them to their worldview.”
In online circles the term “red-pilling” refers to bluntly showing the truth, and “normies” refers generally to apolitical or uninformed people. Directly below the line in the document is hyperlink labeled “example video.”
The video linked in the presentation was made by Lauren Chen, a conservative commentator who now hosts a program on BlazeTV. “If you actually watch the video you can see that it clearly isn’t abusive or promoting harassment, the video was a criticism of social justice,” said Chen when asked for comment on this story. She added that “the video actually promotes equality and individualism.”
On a page from the presentation titled “Strategies we use today,” Yamamoto and de la Rubia list “demote bad content.” They add, “… we should still of course delete and demote, but we can do even more…”
Other actions that could be interpreted as “bad content” could be posting words such as “zucced,” “REEE,” and “normie.” Said the insider, Facebook is “shifting the goal post. It’s one thing, if you’re dropping the n-word, or things like that, using some kind of homophobic or racial slur, by all means that’s something that a platform should not want on it. But now you’re moving it to things like, jokes that conservatives tend to make.”
“Special features” triggered “leading up to important elections”
Image created by Project Veritas to further explain the document.
Two of the “tactics” outlined in the presentation that the Facebook engineers propose for dealing with “troll operations” involve the introduction of a “Troll Twilight Zone.”
Yamamoto and de la Rubia’s presentation says that “troll accounts,” can have their internet bandwidth limited and experience forced glitches like frequent “auto-logout[s]” and the failed upload of comments. These “special features” would be triggered “leading up to important elections.”
Facebook could identify trolls by their vocabulary, friend network, and behavior, according to the presentation. “Facebook has what’s called a Fake Account Index,” explained the insider, “where they assign a score which helps them determine whether the account is a real person or just a dummy spam account. And rightfully so, they want to delete those accounts, that’s okay. They created the troll scoreso they could help identify, using words they would post, pictures, if they were friends with other trolls and then using that to determine whether this person should be on the platform or not.”
The insider thinks that Facebook’s system to score trolls is problematic because, “there’s no accountability and especially when they are using machine learning to do this, whenever an individual actions an account, there is a process where at least you can send a message to Facebook… However, this is all being done without the user’s knowledge, there is no recourse for them.”
Another proposed tactic in the presentation would apparently alert a “troll’s” friends list when they have been banned. The presentation reads:
“When a user does something egregious, warranting an account suspension or deletion, we should notify the friend network
“John Smith’s account has been suspended for 7 days because he shared hate speech in the group Kekistani Special Forces”
The presentation says that notifying a “troll’s” friend list would “strike fear in the hearts of trolls…” and “[n]otified users who accidentally befriended the offender might be more mindful of suspicious accounts, increasing overall herd immunity.”
The insider now works for Project Veritas
Said the insider:
“I think that the biggest thing, that getting the documents, getting video or still pictures of what was going on that shows that it is actually happening. This isn’t rumors, they talk about how right-wingers, they come up with all these crazy theories, and that’s not actually happening at these social media companies. They pooh pooh it. But here it is and it’s in your face.”
The insider was terminated by Facebook shortly after Project Veritas published undercover video of Twitter employees discussing “shadow banning” and other data privacy abuses. When asked if supplying documents and testimony to Project Veritas was “worth it,” the insider said “Yes… I knew what I had seen… this is something they were trying to keep in the shadows, that they did not want to public to know and yet the public has a right to know.”
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe believes that “our collective future depends on those who are willing to give up everything for what they believe.” He believes that if more insiders from large companies step forward and expose similar dishonesty and wrongdoing, that the country will be better educated. O’Keefe said:
“What are you willing to give up? How many of you will step forward? While they may be able to stop one of us, they won’t be able to stop an army. Be brave. Do something.”
