Elon Musk said he will reverse Twitter's permanent ban of former President Donald Trump should the Tesla CEO conclude his deal to acquire the social media company for $44 billion.
Musk, speaking virtually at a Future of the Car summit hosted by the Financial Times, said Twitter's Trump ban was a "morally bad decision" and "foolish in the extreme." He said permanent bans of Twitter accounts should be rare and reserved for accounts that are scams or automated bots.
"I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice," Musk said. "So I think this may end up being frankly worse than having a single forum where everyone can debate. I guess the answer is that I would reverse the permanent ban."
Musk has repeatedly criticized Twitter's content moderation decisions, including the Trump ban, but had mostly avoided saying what he would do about Trump's account until he was pressed for more details Tuesday by Peter Campbell, a Financial Times automotive correspondent. Twitter banned Trump's account in January 2021 for "incitement of violence" following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
FULL- Elon Musk says he will lift Twitter's ban on Trump (newstalkzb.co.nz)
Hurrah. The twitteratti have as much right to be exposed to The donalds idiocy as slowjoe & co's.
As populism rises in the West, so do crackdowns on narratives that deviate from those of the state
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
When US President Joe Biden announced on April 27 that a new Disinformation Governance Board would serve the Department of Homeland Security, it was just the latest turn of the screw on freedom. This time, it’s an affront to citizens’ right to a diversity of information.
It’s one thing to correct inaccurate information, but this new entity seems more oriented towards narrative-policing that cracks down on the interpretation of information rather than the accuracy of it. Headed by a former communications advisor to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Nina Jankowicz, one of the board’s first responsibilities will be to address “disinformation coming from Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border,” according to CBS News. Interesting that these two issues – immigration and foreign conflicts – are currently viewed as two of Washington’s most significant failures, which have given rise to populist dissent. Make no mistake, it’s the dissent that’s the ultimate target.
The fact that a former Ukraine government spin doctor was viewed as the best person to head up the new initiative tells you everything you need to know about its true purpose. Jankowicz published a book in 2020 whose title suggests that she believes the West to be in an online war with Russia. ‘How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict,’ portrays Western narratives as truthful and Russian narratives as “fake news.” Doing so obscures the fact that the mainstream Western media has not been immune to propagating narratives peddled by the state that could retroactively be considered fake news or war propaganda. Meanwhile, Russian media has often provided a platform for those seeking to express – or access – dissenting analysis or information that falls outside of the Western media bubble. Clearly, there are some ‘democracies’ that are bothered by this.
The appetite of Western nations to ensure that their citizens are only fed information that they control through their own highly concentrated government or corporate subsidized media isn’t new. It’s just getting more voracious. Perhaps it’s because the more authoritarian their agenda becomes, the more populist sentiment increases and gives rise to events such as Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, as well as trends such as opposition to US-backed conflicts, the rise in popularity of various populist political parties in Europe, and demonstrations against pandemic mandates, which just happen to be associated with government-issued QR codes.
Dissent is the enemy of authoritarian ambition. Supposedly free countries have manipulated their citizens into believing that censorship of certain views is for people’s own safety and security – hence why the military in Canada, the UK, and France, and now Homeland Security in the US, are involved in narrative policing. In reality, their efforts seem to be more about ensuring citizens’ compliance with their own agenda.
The fusion of domestic security and disinformation came to light as early as 2016, when the European Parliament grotesquely conflated Islamic terrorist propaganda with Russian media, in what seemed to be itself a propaganda effort to undermine the Russian media by equating these two totally unrelated things. But one by one, Western governments have placed free speech under national security control.
France, for example, handed off responsibility for online information arbitration to its domestic intelligence agency (the DGSI) and has reportedly considered involving defense-funded startups in the effort.
Canada has also turned to its security apparatus to shape Canadians’ information landscape – at least twice. The Communications Security Establishment, the country’s electronic spying agency, has been tweeting its own interpretations of disputed events occurring in the fog of the conflict in Ukraine as indisputable fact, while routinely denouncing Russia’s interpretation as invalid.
But Canada’s security establishment isn’t at its first rodeo in attempting to prevent citizens’ thinking from deviating from the state’s messaging. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the country’s armed forces deployed a months-long, military-grade propaganda campaign, which employed tactics honed during the war in Afghanistan, to mind-bend unsuspecting Canadians towards Trudeau’s Covid narrative, CBC News reported last year.
Not to be outdone, the psychological warfare specialists of the 77th brigade of Britain’s armed forces have also worked to shape messaging both in favor of the government’s Covid policies and against anything contrary out of Russia. “One current priority is combating the spread of harmful, false and misleading narratives through disinformation. To bolster this effort, the British Army will be deploying two experts in countering disinformation. They will advise and support NATO in ensuring its citizens have the right information to protect themselves and its democracies are protected from malicious disinformation operations used by adversaries,” Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said last year.
The fact that public safety and disinformation have suddenly become routinely conflated should be worrisome to defenders of whatever remnants of democracy that we still have left. Terrorism, health and now disinformation have all served as pretexts for the rapid erosion of our freedoms – all under the guise of protecting us from bad actors. But are we really safer? Or are we just increasingly less free?
https://www.rt.com/news/554978-us-di...ernance-board/
You have to wonder just how retarded people can be to quote Russian state propaganda claiming other countries control their media.
You have to wonder just how retarded we have become when Russian state media can knock us for our censorship!
So, still no explanation why you think Spain not being at war hinders the country extraditing someone . . . you're really an idiot.
You have to be retarded to think Russia/Soviet Union hasn't been doing that for decades
The NATO to TikTok Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?
TikTok has become an enormously influential medium that reaches over one billion people worldwide. Having control over its algorithm or content moderation means the ability to set the terms of global debate and decide what people see. And what they don’t.
]by Alan Macleod
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – As the bloody conflict in Ukraine continues to escalate, so does the online propaganda war between Russia and the West. A prime example of this is the White House directly briefing influencers on popular social media app TikTok about the war and how to cover it. As the crisis spirals out of control, Americans have turned to TikTok to view real time videos and analysis of the invasion. With the app estimated to have around 70 million U.S. users, the White House is keenly aware of its impact. “We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest … so we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source,” President Joe Biden’s director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, told 30 top TikTok influencers.
TikTok itself has taken steps to align itself with U.S. government policy, deleting more than 320,000 Russian accounts and removing at least 41,000 videos peddling misinformation about the war. In addition to this, it has placed warning labels marked “Russia state-controlled media” on 49 accounts linked to the Russian government. Like other big social media platforms, it has not done the same to Western state-owned outlets such as the BBC, RTÉ, or the CBC.
All this is a far cry from 2020, when President Donald Trump signed an order that would shut down TikTok within 45 days unless it was sold to an American buyer. The Chinese-owned platform, the U.S. government alleged, posed a severe national security threat to the United States. Although TikTok is a Chinese company, it is, ironically, completely blocked inside China, their domestic market being served by a sister app, Douyin, which functions in a similar way but is separated by the Great Firewall. Thus, there is no contact or overlap between the two. After Douyin’s success in China, its parent company ByteDance launched a global platform.
ByteDance first reached a deal to sell TikTok to Microsoft, then to Oracle and Walmart. Yet the new Biden administration, without explanation, quietly dropped the sale requirement indefinitely in early 2021, saying in a court filing that it had begun a review of security concerns cited by the Trump administration.
That decision left buyers and onlookers alike perplexed. Yet studying the backgrounds of dozens of key TikTok employees brought on since the 2020 scare suggests that, instead of destroying TikTok, perhaps the U.S. national security state has co-opted it instead.
High-placed NATO recruits
Since 2020, there has been a wave of former spooks, spies and mandarins appointed to influential positions within TikTok, particularly around content and policy – some of whom, on paper at least, appear unqualified for such roles.
For example, while simultaneously being the Content Policy Lead for TikTok Canada, Alexander Corbeil is also the vice president of the NATO Association of Canada, a NATO-funded organization chaired by former Canadian Minister of Defense David Collenette. In order to join TikTok, Corbeil left his job at the SecDev Foundation, a U.S. State Department-funded security think tank. Corbeil’s work focused on Middle Eastern security and in particular on the war in Syria and what NATO’s role should be.
Another NATO-linked new recruit is Ayse Koçak, a Global Product Policy manager at the company. Before joining TikTok last year, she spent three years at NATO. Like Corbeil, Koçak had special expertise in Middle Eastern politics, including a year’s tour in Iraq as the organization’s deputy senior civilian representative.
Foard Copeland, who works on TikTok’s trust and safety policy, is also an ex-NATO man. Copeland previously worked as a desk officer for NATO, as well as for the Department of Defense. Between 2011 and 2021, he also worked for U.S. contractor Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI), spending much of that time in Afghanistan. DAI has long been accused of being a CIA front group, perhaps with some justification. In 2009, for example, DAI agent Alan Gross was arrested in Cuba and sentenced to 15 years in prison for spying, espionage, and his part in efforts to destabilize the government.
Perhaps the most worrying NATO alumnus, from a public perspective, is new Feature Policy Manager Greg Andersen. According to his own LinkedIn profile, until 2019, Andersen worked on “psychological operations” for NATO. This fact, according to MintPress contributor Lowkey, was removed after his tweet raising concerns about the relationship between big tech and the national security state went viral. Lowkey wrote:
So, the White House is briefing TikTok users about Ukraine. It is also alarming that the current Livestream Policy Manager for Europe, Middle East & Africa at TikTok, Greg Anderson, worked in psychological operations for NATO. A free society is not shaped like this.
FULL- https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-t...agents/280336/
I'm pretty sure the 'high placed Nato recruits' are paid in $ norts. Even Vlad can't influence that.
Sabang probably doesn't even understand why this is funny.
World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has become the latest target of China’s censors, as Beijing attempts to manage discontent with its draconian “zero-COVID” policies.
At a media briefing Tuesday, Dr. Tedros said the WHO believes China’s pandemic approach “will not be sustainable” and recommended a shift in policy.
“The virus is evolving, changing its behaviours, becoming more transmissible,” he told reporters. “When we talk about a ‘zero-COVID’ strategy, we don’t think it’s sustainable.”
Speaking after Dr. Tedros, WHO emergencies director Mike Ryan said governments “need to balance the control measures against the impact they have on society, the impact they have on the economy.”
The WHO officials’ comments were initially shared on Chinese social media, including by verified accounts linked to the United Nations, but the posts were later deleted. Posts under a hashtag on Weibo – “WHO says China’s zero policy is unsustainable” – were also disabled.
China censors WHO chief after he warns ‘zero COVID’ policy not sustainable - The Globe and Mail
As the universal dumbing down continues on.
Part and parcel.
You may wish to read one companies analysis, prior to confirming your prejudices to all here at TD.
TikTok and Douyin Explained
March 22, 2021
"Laws and regulations in China restrict a broad range of speech online, and companies are held liable for the content on their platforms."
TikTok and Douyin Explained - The Citizen Lab
Similar to many countries actions around the world. Are some more restrictive than others? Are all countries "laws and Regulations" the same? Are some authorities "laws and regulations" backed by laws or just a Government appointed "department/person" for example:
Department Of Homeland Security Announces New Disinformation Board
https://www.state.gov/disarming-disinformation/#nav__primary-nav
About the Citizen Lab
"The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, focusing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security. We use a “mixed methods” approach to research combining practices from political science, law, computer science, and area studies. Our research includes: investigating digital espionage against civil society, documenting Internet filtering and other technologies and practices that impact freedom of expression online, analyzing privacy, security, and information controls of popular applications, and examining transparency and accountability mechanisms relevant to the relationship between corporations and state agencies regarding personal data and other surveillance activities."
About the Citizen Lab - The Citizen Lab
A tray full of GOLD is not worth a moment in time.
O Canada!
Rhea Goikoetxea
· Follow
Updated 5h
Do you regret moving to Canada?
Yes I did.
Canada is SEVERELY overhyped! Canada is surprisingly underdeveloped in a HUGE number of ways!
I lasted two years plus some months until I couldn’t take it anymore and drove myself down to the US.
- Cost of living is high. Internet/phone unbelievably expensive. 275 CAD a month with Rogers. But it’s not just phone/internet. Even flying out of Canada is unbelievably expensive. That is supposedly because the country lacks competition as Air Canada runs the show. Which takes me to the next point.
- Everything is a monopoly so customer gets screwed with poor service, huge prices. From the airlines industry, to telephone companies, to cable, to whatever, you’re at the mercy of the monopoly and they DO NOT care about you! Trust me, you can ROT IN CANCEROUS HELL and they won’t bend a finger to help you because THEY TRULY BUT TRULY DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU!
- Canadians are brainwashed into believing they are unbelievably lucky for living in Canada so they do not question anything, they are passive and accepting of the maple leaf penis that gets shoved down their butts everyday courtesy of Ottawa. The government is UNBELIEVABLY intrusive! To the point is big brother like.
- Fake friendliness which never goes beyond hello…. Everything is a “sorry”, I am so sick of the damn “sorry’s”. Here is the thing, they do not mean it, it’s EMPTY! Sorry means nothing, it’s not being polite, it’s a custom and it’s largely fake! I’ll be an asshole but I’ll say sorry so it’s ok!
- It sucks when it comes to dating, passive men almost afraid of approaching women. DULL DULL DULL. At times I would question myself, “damn I must be very ugly”, I mean men act as if I do not exist. But then I would head into the Us, Colombia, Spain, Belgium and guys would hit on me. Back into Canada and back to being invisible because men are extremely passive!
- Canadian homes are badly insulated and cheaply made, it’s January -35C/negative Fahrenheit outside and homes feel drafty. My friend had frozen canned items in her cabinets because turns out the kitchen pantry was not insulated. Of course, the rent was up in the sky!
- Cities are dull, monotonous with little focus on urban beauty judging by the cement block boxes they call buildings. Everything is made out of cardboard and sheetrock so you get the feeling of being a run down movie set. And the suburbs are even more depressing with this gray like homes that follow the car dependent US design with almost no charm.
- More racist and more backwards than it likes to admit. Especially after all the finger-pointing they do when it comes to Americans.
- A nation whose identity is based off on having an Angel complex towards the US. Canada is obsessed with demonizing Americans while patting themselves on the back.
- Mediocre job market.
- Extremely bureaucratic. Dealing with bureaucracy in Ontario is traumatizing!
- HORRENDOUS Weather! From October to April expect snow, freezing temperatures, endless gray. Canadians convince themselves it’s fun to have cities covered in melting-muddy snow paired with awful grey skies for four months out of the year.
- Canadian experience is a way for them to fuck highly qualified immigrant workers by condemning to do jobs no Canadian wants. I’ve never seen so many engineers from India and the Middle East driving cabs or delivering food!
- Repetitive landscapes. Forget diversity of landscapes… The whole driving from arid west coast through deserts, then endless flatlands, ending up in semi tropical rainforests on the American south kind of thing does not happen in Canada. From Nova Scotia to Vancouver it’s all the same… Pine tree after pine tree until the eye can see and then random lake. Thousands of kilometers/miles of nothing but that until it all looks the same to you.
- Canada has the charm of Cleveland OH and the efficiency of New Orleans LA. Dull cities, dull people, dull weather for most of the year, no creativity, no dynamism, no energy. Just dull people working in whatever mediocre job, going home in their foreign made cars, buying useless cheap stuff from foreign chains, and being dull watching foreign American TV because even that they can’t produce!
- Cultureless, soulless. They claim Quebec city is like Europe but its fortress was built by an American in the late 19th century.
- The only place in Canada that does not feel like an airport lounge is Montreal. Too bad the weather makes it unlivable.
- Mediocre mindset, things halfway done are acceptable and if you’re thriving they’ll look at you with suspicion. Do not expect a dynamic society!
- Extremely high cost of utilities with below par salaries and a tax system that completely bleeds you outta your a**. Bonus time is a fun time when people literally shed years because govt takes almost half of your lump sum bonus. And if you want to buy a house! HAAAAAA good luck! It’s so overpriced you don’t stand a chance!
BTW, every time you mention the cons of Canada to Canadians, they overcompensate by telling you the Us is dangerous (regardless of how unrelated the US is to the subject) and how Americans have no health insurance. (Once again, even if the topic does not relate to US folks in any way)
Ironically in Canada the healthcare system is abysmally mediocre!
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-regret-moving-to-Canada
I guess people have different tastes. I thought Vancouver was OK.
^
There's a lot of non truths in that, but it's not worth the time to point them out. She comes across as a narcissist so Im not surprised she didnt like it. Canada has its faults for sure, but not as many as most countries. Australia is the most racist one I've been to.
And if China is so great, why do so many of them live here?
Canada is ok, apart from SoCal and the French, they have not filled every space with unsustainable property growth.
Pretty much every country on earth has a sizeable Chinese population. They are everywhere, because even countries that have major downsides are a better alternaive than subsisting in the dark, in China!
The Chinese who managed to escape the claustrophobic conditions in China are the lucky ones, unless they landed in Russia ….
This rather intelligent Chinese person does not seem to agree.
Mika Jiang
studied International Law at Harvard University
Updated Nov 30, 2019
It was the right decision at the time when China was not a good place to be. Now that China has surpassed Canada in many aspects moving here is starting to feel like a big mistake. I’ve been in Canada for 20 plus years but not much as changed unlike other countries. Here are some major issues:
1.) The taxes are very high and become progressively higher as you make more money. So success basically yields diminishing returns and effectively punishes success and rewards failure. This lead to a huge brain drain problem where the most industrious Canadians move to the US where they are treated better.
2.) The universal healthcare is very inefficient. I’ve waited in the ER for 15 hours once. Getting a specialist could take months. Check-ups are not covered. You can’t even opt out of this system as they’ve made private health insurance illegal.
3.) No matter how much stellar work experience you have from other developed countries they won’t be recognized. I think they do this to protect local Canadians so they don’t have to compete with international talent. Very ironic as they set a very high bar for skilled immigration when they don’t even utilize those skills. There are doctors from Russia that end up as taxi drivers because their license and experience is null and void here. To me this is institutional racism.
4.) The culture is very much rooted in all the trappings of left-wing ideology. You are taught from a very young age to look at wealth and upward mobility with suspicion. There’s a general mentality of victimhood and entitlement. If you’re not successful it must be the fault of corporations or rich people. The gov’t is supposed to solve all your problems. I find this to be very demoralizing and depressing. I don’t think this is the message you should send to young people.
5.) There’s a drug problem on the streets. I’ve never seen so many meth heads anywhere else in the world. I’m not sure what caused this. Maybe the laws are too lenient towards drug dealing and usage? In major cities downtown you will find a lot of druggies panhandling for money. Mostly young people.
6.) The media is very biased. Almost everything reported on China and any other non OECD countries is 100% negative and nobody ever questions its validity. The exception is US, they are also viewed as evil. The people here see themselves as the good guys and the rest of the world is problematic or straight up unethical.
I think when we left China we thought we were escaping an oppressive regime to live in a democratic utopia. What we learned is that democracy may not be the best form of gov’t (even though they train you to believe it is) and western media does just as good of a job brainwashing their own people. The narrative Canada sells is not necessarily a reflection of reality. Perhaps freedom is just a concept.
Edit: I just want to add that I think the reason Canada sits on its high horse of ethics and points the fingers at others is because they only have one neighbor and it’s a friendly one. They have plenty of natural resources and low population. They never have to worry about starvation or invasion. It’s easy to be ethical when you don’t have to make the tough decisions to defend your territory and secure resources. It’s not fair for them to judge.
Do you regret moving to Canada? - Quora
I guess yours is not the only opinion (thank goodness).
Last edited by sabang; 14-05-2022 at 07:44 AM.
Woman makes decision she later regrets. Well colour me shocked.
Are you suggesting that the worlds China towns are populated by unhappy people?One woman changes her mind v millions of happy settled residents who have no intention of returning.
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