What happens when Google hides the news? … What do you mean “When?”

Early in January, the Guardian Australia published alarming reports of a bushfire ravaging vast areas of the southern continent.

Three fires moving rapidly across New South Wales and Victoria had merged to create one gigantic “megablaze,” the news outlet reported, forcing midnight evacuations and the deployment of thousands of firefighters across the region.

Some Australians who rely on Google’s search engine for news might have missed this.

At the time of the bushfires, the multinational technology company was “running a few experiments” that removed some media sites from its search results, it told the Guardian a few days later.

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Tucker Carlson slams NYU’s ‘farcical’ study saying claims of conservative ‘censorship’ on social media are ‘disinformation’

Tucker Carlson slams NYU’s ‘farcical’ study saying claims of conservative ‘censorship’ on social media are ‘disinformation’

Tucker Carlson has labelled ‘farcical’ a New York University study into censorship of conservatives on social media, after the authors admitted there was no data to support their findings.

On Monday NYU researchers published ‘False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives.’

In their report, the authors stated that claims of anti-conservative bias are ‘a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.’

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Tackling Big Tech – Diane Francis: Canada must move quickly to combat the social media onslaught

Tackling Big Tech – Diane Francis: Canada must move quickly to combat the social media onslaught

The combination of monopoly power and deregulation has given rise to monolithic social media empires that have become more powerful than nation-states, corporations and societies. Finally, Australia, the European Union, the United States and France are starting to regulate Silicon Valley. This is essential to protect their media, cultures and national political conversations as well as their citizens’ privacy and safety.

Government intervention? What could go wrong? I suspect this will be a case of Government, it’s media, and Big Tech working hand in glove to smother us all.

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Poland’s Freedom Act Will Empower Public to Overturn Big Tech Shadowbans

Poland’s new Freedom Act against Big Tech censorship will see members of the public automatically notified of “shadowbans” and empowered to overturn restrictions if their speech online is lawful.

Speaking exclusively to Breitbart News, Deputy Minister of Justice Sebastian Kaleta, who is spearheading the new legislation, confirmed that “every time an algorithm is used to limit reach, the user will be informed if and why his reach is being limited.”

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With new legislation, Steven Guilbeault will make few friends in Big Tech

MONTREAL — Steven Guilbeault, the minister of Canadian Heritage, doesn’t like Facebook much. The blue-hued social media platform is mentioned 34 times, almost always negatively, in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Guilbeault’s 2019 treatise on artificial intelligence. To wit: when it isn’t Hoovering data, helping elect the likes of Donald Trump or otherwise destroying humanity’s social fabric, Guilbeault says Facebook is busy hooking users on its product much as heroin ropes in addicts.

I want both sides to lose.

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Tackling Big Tech: Are Canadians going to allow ‘Big Tech’ to determine our future?

Tackling Big Tech: Are Canadians going to allow ‘Big Tech’ to determine our future?

Canada is on the edge of a precipice. We have the opportunity to stand up for ourselves on the global stage and protect our virtual rights or we can allow “Big Tech” to determine our future. In Australia, Google and Facebook are fighting the government’s attempts to level the playing field for their own news media outlets and the battle is very likely coming to Canada next as we debate new mandatory fees for these corporations.

Tough to pick a side here. Postmedia are avid recipients of Trudeau’s media welfare plan but Geez I hate the Tech Oligopoly.

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Facebook warns Canada against taking Australia’s ‘aggressive’ tack in making them pay for news content

OTTAWA — Representatives of Facebook Canada warned Ottawa against the hasty introduction of rules that would force social media giants to pay for news content shared on their platforms, after Australia took an overly “loud and aggressive” tack on the same issue.

See also – Canadian Heritage Minister, Top Bureaucrats Deny ‘Cozy’ Relationship Between Department And Facebook Canada

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‘They don’t want to lose control’: Australia’s competition chief on his country’s efforts to regulate big tech

‘They don’t want to lose control’: Australia’s competition chief on his country’s efforts to regulate big tech

Australia has become a test case for addressing the market dominance of big tech, one closely watched by Canada and the world

Rod Sims, the serious and sometimes feisty head of Australia’s competition and consumer authority, takes a liking to a comparison offered up to describe the battle playing out in his country between news publishers and big tech platforms controlled by Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc.

News is like toothpaste: Consumers want and need it and would clearly suffer if the dominant distributors squeezed suppliers so much that it could no longer be made.

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Academic Study Finds Big-Tech Elites Are In Their ‘Own Class’, Different To Rest Of Humanity

Academic Study Finds Big-Tech Elites Are In Their ‘Own Class’, Different To Rest Of Humanity

An academic study carried out by researchers in the US and Germany has concluded that big-tech elites are completely different to all other people on the planet, and can be placed in their own class.

“Our research contributes to closing a research gap in societies with rising inequalities,” note the authors of the study from two German universities and the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies in New York.

The research centres around analysing language used in close to 50,000 tweets and other online statements by 100 of the richest tech-elites as listed by Forbes.

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Will the Tech ‘Wokeforce’ Be With Us If We Go to War?

Will the Tech ‘Wokeforce’ Be With Us If We Go to War?

When Google-owned YouTube suspended Donald Trump’s ability to post videos last week it joined Facebook and Twitter in blocking the president, and many Trump supporters, from their platforms. Conservatives and others have denounced the moves as censorship. But the decisions by tech companies to refuse service to those they do not approve of – including the president of the United States – also raise concerns about national security.

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Project Veritas Video: Twitter Exec Vijaya Gadde Lays Out ‘Global Approach‘ to Censor Americans

The investigative journalism group Project Veritas recently published insider footage of Twitter’s Legal, Policy, and Trust Lead discussing plans for Twitter’s expansion of moderation enforcement on a global scale. Progressive Twitter exec Vijaya Gadde described applying the company’s “global approach” to censorship to Americans including political leaders, reaffirming the company’s belief that President Donald Trump’s posts were “inciting violence and having real-world harm.”

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Big Tech declares war: ‘Woke capitalism instead of freedom’

It started with President Trump getting kicked off Twitter, but the rush to banish him from the public square over the U.S. Capitol riot is threatening to engulf vast swaths of the right as conservatives gird themselves for what they describe as a political purge.

In the more than week since the attack, dozens of major U.S. corporations have halted donations to Republican lawmakers who objected to the 2020 election certification. Warnings about hiring Trump administration officials are circulating, while right-tilting Twitter accounts are being de-amplified with dramatic declines in their followers.

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Oh, My …

Was it something they said?:

Twitter Inc. is leading social-media stocks lower Monday as investors digest a new reality for the services after Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump from its platform and Facebook Inc. said it would restrict him at least until the end of his term.

The announcement from Twitter TWTR, -5.91%, which came late Friday, followed a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters midweek. Twitter charged that Trump’s tweets after the riot served to glorify violence and went against the company’s terms of service. Facebook FB, -3.54% had announced Thursday that Trump would be barred from its platform at least until the inauguration.

Twitter shares are off 6.6% in Monday morning trading, while Facebook shares are down 3%. Shares of Apple Inc. AAPL, -2.25% and Alphabet Inc. GOOG, -2.18% GOOGL, -2.14%, both of which pulled right-wing social-media app Parler from their app stores citing lax moderation policies, are off 2.2% and 1.7%, respectively. Shares of Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -1.94%, which booted Parler from its AWS web-hosting platform, are down 1.4%.

“While the week will certainly be remembered for far more shocking events, it’s not lost on us that we may be at the precipice of a change to long-standing internet rules of engagement,” Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik wrote. “Perhaps the limited time left in Trump’s presidency eased social media worries of a presidential retaliation, while a more cynical view we’ve heard suggests that these platforms took actions precisely because of the Democrats’ recent Senate win.”

Cynical? Really?

Wow …

 

(Courtesy: SDA)

 

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Column: “The storming of the U.S. Capitol wasn’t about white supremacy, whatever Canadian pundits say”

I know that it’s Jonathan Kay but just read the whole thing:

Canadian political neuroses are never more evident than when some political cataclysm unfolds in the United States, such as Wednesday’s mob assault on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. When news first breaks, the initial response on social media typically presents Canada as the respectable teetotaller living upstairs from a pair of boozy rageaholics having their nightly punch-up. But then, like clockwork, there comes a second wave of commentary, this one insisting that we are, in fact, fully complicit in America’s sins. “As Canadians, we shouldn’t be smug,” read one viral Tweet on Wednesday. “What’s happening in the (United States) could easily happen in Ottawa. White supremacy and white supremacists call Canada home, too.” …

Racism is a real problem in all countries — including Canada and the United States. And it will never be completely eradicated because human brains are wired for tribalism. But as anyone who’s actually bothered to look at U.S. voting data knows, the 2020 election actually featured a welcome narrowing of racial voting differences: Despite his often genuinely racist rhetoric, Trump picked up voter share among non-white voters, as compared with 2016, while losing a large portion of his white base. Moreover, as numerous experts have argued convincingly (including Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who I don’t think has yet been cancelled for white supremacy), the Trump phenomenon maps pretty well onto the areas of the United States that have been decimated by outsourcing, automation, income inequality and downward mobility. These root causes don’t excuse racism or mob violence. But it’s worth noting that they’re exactly the sort of issues that leftists (including those at the Star) once used to care about, before they realized they could earn more hand-clap emojis by tracing every spasm of political discontent to this or that Protocol inscribed by the Elders of Whiteness.

 

What Mr. Kay fails to realise is that Donald Trump is not and never has been a racist in any form sensible people would recognise. Such a slur was used as a cudgel to make him less palatable and we all know it.

Black Americans are not children who need coddling. They voted for Trump for the same reasons any other American would: he was a populist who promised and delivered employment, an issue I’m sure not even Big Tech could de-platform from recent memory.

 

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What AG Barr’s Departure Means for Google

Attorney General William Barr’s December 23 resignation caught many in the tech accountability movement by surprise.

Barr was a driving force behind the Justice Department’s landmark Google antitrust suit in October. His departure has understandably raised questions about the future of the department’s second antitrust investigation against Google and the general approach the Trump DoJ will take towards the company as it nears the end of its term.

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