and in other news...
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech-hypocrisy-rcna81961 (April 28, 2023)
New data exposes Elon Musk’s free speech charade
If Elon Musk loves free speech, why is he so cozy with dissent-crushing governments?
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has made a big show of portraying the site before his takeover as a bastion of government censorship. He has coordinated with journalists to publish information known as the “Twitter Files” that suggest that the company was overly compliant in submitting to demands from governments — especially the U.S. government — to take down posts or limit their visibility.
But new data suggests that, at least by some measures, Twitter has become more compliant with government authorities than before he took over. Musk’s promises to shepherd Twitter into a new era of radical free speech are looking phonier by the day.
It’s evident that Musk has failed to fulfill his mandate of ushering in a new era of free speech to the platform.
According to a report from Rest of World, based on data from Harvard University’s Lumen Database, in the six months since Musk’s arrival, Twitter’s compliance with government demands for censorship or surveillance has risen to over 80%, from around 50%. The information comes via Twitter’s largely automated self-reporting to the Lumen database, which monitors government requests for content removal online. According to Lumen, out of 971 government requests received from last Oct. 27 — when Musk took over — to April 26, Twitter completely complied with 808 requests, partially complied with another 154 cases and did not report a response for 9 cases. Notably, Twitter did not report any outright refusals during this period, as pre-Musk Twitter did from time to time.
Some of the most worrisome requests have come from India, where Narendra Modi’s right-wing government has bombarded Twitter with demands to censor unflattering media portrayals of the governing party. Under Musk, Twitter blocked in India posts sharing a BBC documentary that questioned Modi’s role in a 2002 massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat. (Musk at one point said he hadn’t known that Twitter was complying with India’s requests, and cited being busy with Tesla and SpaceX as distractions.) Twitter also recently complied with the Modi government’s requests to locally block the accounts of over a hundred politicians, activists and journalists as it conducted a manhunt for a Sikh nationalist leader. Before Musk took over, Twitter was complying with about 20 percent of India’s requests; it’s unclear where that number is now.
Another authoritarian democracy, Turkey, has been the most prolific submitter of requests to Twitter during Musk’s tenure, and they’ve been overwhelmingly fulfilled. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country has passed multiple rounds of laws restricting speech in recent years. Experts say the government views regulating Twitter as a key tool for suppressing dissent ahead of this year’s elections.
Nor has Musk changed his mind about his core beliefs that are in direct opposition to human freedom: universal basic income, the climate agenda, one world government, transhumanism.
What’s being done with Musk in real time online is that his persona is continually being refined. He has stated in the past his belief in one-world government, on Twitter and in interviews. Anything related to this has now been scrubbed online. If you search “Elon Musk one world government” there is article after article stating that he is against it.
Musk is the point man chosen by the globalists to usher in the New World Order. They will fine tune his public persona to whatever they have to in order to make him more acceptable and accessible. He is a product being sold to the masses, and his handlers will listen to the critics and the people who don’t like his agenda - and then make any changes necessary for him to be more agreeable to the skeptics.
As the globalist point man to usher in the New World Order, he must co-opt patriotic middle America. His free speech schtick - and his new (phony) stance against global government - are the perfect ruse.
Twitter Inc. 'No Longer Exists' As Elon Musk Inches Closer To X 'Everything App' Ambitions
Twitter changed its incorporated name to X Corp., the name of its owner and CEO Elon Musk’s long-envisioned everything app that extends far past social media, as Musk extends his grand aspirations for the company.
Twitter Inc. “no longer exists” and the company is now a part of X Corp., according to an April 4 filing in California federal court.
Musk pointed to the fairly obscurely located filing in an early Tuesday tweet, which simply read, “X.”
The centibillionaire has been obsessed with the idea of X leading up to and following his $44 billion purchase of Twitter last fall; Musk said in October the Twitter acquisition was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
Musk has indicated he hopes to transform Twitter/X into a wide-ranging service akin to China’s WeChat, telling a Morgan Stanley conference last month he wants his app “to become the biggest financial institution in the world.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wechat-surveillance-users-outside-china-1.5558503 (May 7, 2020)
WeChat's surveillance of international users boosts censorship in China, researchers say
Citizen Lab says images, documents sent between international users train censorship algorithm
WeChat, which allows users to send messages, interact on social networks and make digital payments, is owned by the Chinese communications company Tencent and is the most popular social networking app in China. Globally, it has more than one billion users.
Research by Citizen Lab found that documents and images sent between users with accounts registered outside China triggered censorship when those same documents and images were sent to a user inside China.
"The company is essentially undertaking political surveillance on one segment of users, those who are using their international version of the application outside of mainland China," said Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab.
"That data is being used to then train the algorithms to better undertake censorship and surveillance of mainland China's users. That's pretty shocking."
Citizen Lab previously found that WeChat censors certain keywords sent by users with accounts registered to Chinese phone numbers but not ones with international phone numbers, and that WeChat censored images in China that it deemed to be political.
Musk is presented as being anti-censorship, but when you dig a little deeper you find evidence that exactly the opposite is true.
That’s a real juggling act.