| Amazon could have forced America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) offline had the organization not acted quickly to look for an alternative. The Big Tech company seems to have taken issue with the organization for claiming COVID-19 vaccines may not be worth it in children. America’s Frontline Doctors had its website built with WebFlow, which is ultimately hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon, like other Big Tech, deemed the organization’s content to be “misinformation” and issued a notice last month that it should be removed from AWS. “We wanted to reach out to you about your project, americasfrontlinedoctors.org. This project is hosting misinformation about vaccines and was reported as objectionable content to AWS,” the notice from WebFlow stated. “AWS is the service we use at Webflow to host our websites so we can no longer host americasfrontlinedoctors.org.” |
| Amazon gave the organization until May 31 to switch to a different host. The notice forced AFLDS to rebuild its website from scratch using servers located around the globe. “We were forced to take immediate action because we will never allow Jeff Bezos and Amazon to censor us from speaking freely about medical treatments, medical studies and individual liberty, or from challenging the government narrative surrounding COVID-19 vaccines,” the AFLDS said in a statement. “Jeff Bezos and Amazon cannot argue with our scientific data and facts, so they would rather delete us entirely,” the statement added. “We have already been blacklisted on social media, and cannot host videos on YouTube. We must build our own internet servers that cannot be silenced by Big Tech, Big Pharma or Big Government.” AFLDS is an organization that claims to be committed to “providing Americans with science-based facts about COVID-19 and fighting the politicization of medicine and media censorship.” It first became popular when it held a censored press conference where some of its members promoted hydroxychloroquine, an FDA-approved medication that the WHO and CDC at the time insisted is not effective against COVID. Amazon’s notice came a few days after AFLDS filed a motion seeking a temporary restraining order (TRO) at a federal court against the vaccination of children under the age of 16. The organization argued that the emergency use authorization (EUA) allowing the vaccination of kids should not have been granted. |
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| THREATENED |
| Paul Saladino MD, the host of The Fundamental Health Podcast, has informed his followers on Instagram that his account may soon be deleted by the Facebook-owned company. In a post accompanied by a screenshot of the warning message he received, Saladino said that he was not aware of why Instagram found his content objectionable, but assumed it had to do with his stance on Covid. The notice cites two instances – one from June this year and one from November 2020, that Instagram believes didn’t follow its guidelines. |
| The November post speaks about vitamin D insufficiency and that this indicator of metabolic dysfunction can be corrected easily. The message warning Saladino that his account may get deleted also advises him to “learn and follow” the guidelines in order to avoid this outcome. In sharing the warning with his followers, Saladino, in a sarcastically toned post, said he would seek forgiveness from the powers that be and comply with their orders such as quarantining “forever” – as he “worships at the altar of Anthony Fauci.” Judging by the post, Saladino is critical of Fauci and Covid restrictions such as mask-wearing and lockdowns, so although Instagram continues with the tactic used by major social media not to reveal concrete causes for censorship, his guess that this is related to his views on the pandemic is likely correct. Facebook – and Instagram – have recently made a massive U-turn on one component of their Covid-related censorship – discussing the origin of the virus is now allowed. But the political signal to let people criticize masks, lockdowns, or Dr. Fauci has clearly not arrived yet. After further making fun of Instagram by “humbly apologizing” and “promising” to learn the guidelines going forward, for the sake of being allowed to stay on what he said is a “shitty platform” – Saladino told his followers that he had created a backup account, just in case. Some of his fans advised him to switch to another platform, like Locals or Gab, or one of the block-chain based solutions, in order to make sure he has a platform in the first place, and one where he can express himself freely. |
| IRONIC |
| Matt Orfalea, an independent video creator, who often covers politics, was censored for covering YouTube’s censorship of ivermectin. YouTube punished him for private uploads of clips. YouTube has been censoring content suggesting ivermectin could be effective against COVID-19 for violating its policies on “medical misinformation.” In January, the platform removed videos of a senate committee hearing where evidence of the effectiveness of the drugs was being discussed. More recently, YouTube removed videos where Dr. Bret Weinstein and Sen. Ron Johnson discussed new evidence of ivermectin as an effective treatment for COVID. Orfalea uploaded a video about the censorship, which is still available on YouTube. However, he was slapped with a one week suspension for uploading what he says was “unpublished rough cuts of the same video.” As he explains in a blog post on Medium: “It’s always been a regular part of my workflow to upload private cuts to YouTube for two reasons. (1) To see if YouTube recognizes any violations or issues that could lead to demonetization, so I can fix if necessary before publishing. (2) To quality check and preview how it plays on YouTube. Often, I see things I want to change, and repeat the process, uploading another version.” |
| On the night of June 14, he received the first warning from YouTube, and three of his unpublished videos on the censorship were removed, despite the fact that he had not shared them publicly. To avoid getting in trouble with the platform he deleted all other related unpublished cuts that had not been removed. However, the following morning, he was suspended over one of the videos he had deleted the night before. According to him he was punished on his first strike and for videos that were not public. |
| DYSTOPIAN |
| Lanour Beauty Lounge in Dubai is offering a “Microchip Manicure,” where a tiny microchip is placed on a customer’s fingernail. They install a wide range of information on the chips, including a customer’s contact information, allowing the chip to be used as a digital business card. “We install the information that you want, like your name, your mobile number, your social media accounts and website as well,” salon founder Nour Makarem said. |
| The chips use near field communication (NFC) technology to connect with nearby mobile devices. Makarem added that they started offering “smart nails” during the pandemic, and hopes to find other uses for the nail microchips in the future, such as contactless payments and digital menus for waiters. “The only challenge was how to make it small enough to fit on a fingernail,” she said. The beauty parlor claims it has provided more than 500 “Microchip manicures.” |
| OVERREACH |
| A copyright lawsuit filed by several record labels, including Sony, against YouTube rippers is in the discovery process, where the plaintiffs are demanding logs of users location and content downloaded. The operators of the sites claim to not keep such logs, but could be forced by the court to begin doing so if companies like Sony get their way. Record labels, especially big ones, see YouTube rippers as a major threat, as they allow users to “own” their music without buying or streaming it. To fight this threat they have taken several measures, including taking site operators to court. In 2018, several major record labels, including Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros, sued Tofig Kurbanov, the operator of two popular YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com. The plaintiffs had hoped for a quick case, where the court would order the immediate shut down of the sites for copyright infringement. However, Kurbanov fought back. He started by arguing that a US court had no jurisdiction over a foreign site and that the site is operated and hosted in Russia. However, in March a federal court in Virginia ruled that Kurbanov has to fight the piracy allegations. Now, the case is in the discovery process. As part of discovery, the record labels requested documentation from the YouTube ripping sites showing, among other things, what content was downloaded, and the location of the users. We obtained a copy of the requests for you here. Most of the information the labels are demanding could easily be retrieved from server log files, which the site operator claims he does not store. The labels filed a request for a court order compelling the sites to start logging and hand over the log files. “In the ordinary course of operations, Defendant’s Websites necessarily generate server data, including data that identifies: (a) the YouTube videos being stream-ripped; (b) the MP3 audio files being copied and distributed; and (c) the geographic locations of the users downloading the audio files,” they wrote in the court filing. “Respectfully, the Court should order Defendant to preserve and produce this key evidence.” The labels further argued that the information they need already exists, only the site operator has chosen not to log it:“The problem is that Defendant has configured his server software to turn the logging function off — thus, continually overwriting important data that Plaintiffs explicitly requested in discovery.” |
| BACKFIRED |
| Attempts from woke activists to “cancel” a game developer have backfired; the game’s popularity has increased and its positive reviews have skyrocketed. On June 18, one of the developers of Factorio, Michal Kovarik, aka Kovarex, posted a blog as part of the “Friday Facts” series, where he recommended Robert Cecil Martin, aka Uncle Bob, lectures on project management and programming. |
| Some pointed out what they say are Uncle Bob’s controversies, such as his “sexist” and “racist” comments, as a reason Kovarex should not have recommended him. “I know I know, politics and games don’t mix well,” user d40b wrote on the Factorio subreddit. “But promoting a controversial person without any reservations _is_ a political act.” |
| “So it might be worth considering to add a disclaimer. His actions and words have hurt a lot of (typically) underrepresented people and I’d personally prefer to avoid more people getting hurt by promoting him.” “Take the cancel culture mentality and shove it up your ass,” Kovarex replied. Before moderators deleted the exchange, due to “threats and calls for violence,” Kovarex explained himself in detail, and blasted the users who accused him of being a right-wing bigot. |
| “Why am I right wing bigot again, I hear it again and again, and yet, I didn’t hear any reason for that claim. “This clearly shows the weird one dimensional world you see. Everyone is either a friend or an enemy, and we need to decide fast! “All I did is to deny bashing on someones proffessional [sic] work for his political views, I didn’t even know what they are, and somehow, you had to put me on your political axis somewhere, and sicne your political axis is so full of hate, you assume that I hate you or LBGT+ people, or whatever you don’t like about the other side your axis. “You have to understand, that I’m not from the US, and I’m nowhere on your little axis, I’m not your friend or enemy, I’m just a guy who would like to decouple ideas from people.” According to Kovarex, people should separate someone’s professional life from their personal and political ideologies. |
| “I won’t even search him up. You know why? Because I don’t care at all. I don’t care if he cheats on his wife, is a bigot, or pays proper tips in restaurant. These things are simply not relevant.” “If Stalin had a good writeup on programming, would linking that be dangerous, because some people might read it, start liking HIM, thus start liking communism and the ineviteble mass murder that follows it? Is this how little we trust other individuals when it comes to access to information? “I personally trust my readers to have the ability to create their own opinions instead of blindly following whatever says the person they like.” While the redditor did not specifically call for the cancelation of Kovarex, a user in the steam forums did just that, calling on people not to buy the game. “The main dev is transphobic+ more and got canceled dont buy the game anymore,” the user implored. “the dev is problematic you should not buy their game.” But the attempts backfired big time. Some in the Steam forum even vowed to buy the game to spite the user. |
| Kovarex was not canceled, Factorio became more popular, rising to #62 on the most played games on Steam chart and the games positive reviews skyrocketed. Since the controversy began, more than 1200 positive reviews flooded in to counteract the activists. |
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Android users alarmed to wake up to COVID tracking app auto-installed Posteingang Massachusetts Android users alarmed to wake up to COVID tracking app auto-installed Massachusetts recently launched a contact tracing app for COVID-19, called MassNotifyApp, to track the spread of the virus in the state. But there is one big problem with the app; it is installing itself on Android devices without users’ consent, and even on devices with parental-lock. “Thank you MA/Google for silently installing #MassNotify on my phone without consent. But I have a request: Can you also silently install an app that makes my phone explode and kill me?” someone wrote on Twitter. The story is perhaps one of the most egregious violations of an app during the pandemic. It also contradicts what Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, said about the app; that it would be voluntary. While launching the app last week, the governor said: “As we embrace our new normal, MassNotify is a voluntary, free tool to provide additional peace of mind to residents as they return to do the things they love.” The app, which Google and Apple helped develop, also claims contact tracing is “completely anonymous, with no location tracking or exchange of personal information.” It further claims that it does not share location data or any other personal information with Apple, Google, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or any other entity. But the claims directly contradict the reality. The app had over 300 reviews on Saturday, most of them one-star ratings because of its intrusive nature. One of the reviews reads: “App automatically installed without consent. Weirdly it has no icon and I can’t find any way to open it and see if it could be useful. Bizarre that the state did something like this the very day the state of emergency ended, when over half of adults, myself included, are vaccinated. What info could possibly be necessary with this egregious level of invasiveness NOW? A year ago it would have made sense.” Another Android user Lex Neva, noted that the app installed itself even on parental-locked devices: “This installed silently on my daughter’s phone without consent or notification. She cannot have installed it herself since we use Family Link and we have to approve all app installs. I have no idea how they pulled this off, but it had to involve either Google, or Samsung, or both. Normal apps can’t just install themselves. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but this doesn’t count as ‘voluntary.’ We need information, and we need it now, folks.” “Ghost installed without my permission, and keeps sending me push notifications. I removed it and reinstalled itself,” wrote user Beth Sivlaggio. “This isn’t something I want in my phone, it’s not something that has permission to be on my phone nor should the commonwealth or any other place/company be allowed to put something on my phone without my permission.” In a statement to Reclaim The Net, a Google spokesperson suggested that even though the app was present, it wasn’t functional until users activate it, saying: “We have been working with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to allow users to activate the Exposure Notifications System directly from their Android phone settings. This functionality is built into the device settings and is automatically distributed by the Google Play Store, so users don’t have to download a separate app. COVID-19 Exposure Notifications are enabled only if a user proactively turns it on. Users decide whether to enable this functionality and whether to share information through the system to help warn others of possible exposure.” If you care about this stuff, you can help out and become a supporter. WHAT’S HOLDING THE JUDGE? A year after Twitter was sued for allegedly conspiring with Saudi Arabia to censor dissent, the lawsuit sits in limboIt has been almost a year since Ali Al-Ahmed, a Saudi who was granted asylum in the US in 1998, filed a lawsuit against Twitter in the Southern District of New York for the platform allegedly turning a blind eye to Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) spies it employed accessing his personal data to hand over to KSA’s government. And not much has changed – the court and Judge Valerie Caproni who is in charge are yet to make any moves and decide whether the case can proceed. In the lawsuit filed in June 2020, Al-Ahmed, who is a political dissident, accused Twitter of ignoring this handiwork of two of its employees, Ali Alzabarah and Ahmad Abouammo – allegedly Saudi intelligence officers – who were themselves charged in the US with espionage a year earlier. The data that these Twitter employees with a spying agenda were able to access from the inside revealed Al-Ahmed’s email address, phone number, birthday, IP address, and contacts. The account itself, @AliAlahmed, had 36,000 followers and was then suspended by Twitter, as were the accounts of several other Twitter users who criticized the original ban. Al-Ahmed asserted that he got cut off from his followers without being given a right to appeal, describing at the same time his presence on Twitter as the account taking many years to build and represent intellectual property that had helped with his professional credibility and income. The account was used as a hub for insiders and whistleblowers in the KSA sending out news and tips to be disseminated to Western media. Commenting last June on the shutting down of his own and some of his followers’ accounts, Al-Ahmed said, “This is not only immoral, it is undemocratic.” The filing specified that the plaintiff believed Twitter had violated the contract it has with users once they sign on to the platform, as well as the Stored Communications Act, and other rules. Al-Ahmed claimed that Twitter failed to provide security to the account, meaning that sensitive data was disclosed not only to KSA authorities but also to other third parties. At the time, Al-Ahmed alleged that Twitter’s behavior was not accidental or anomalous, but that it, as well some other Big tech corporations turn a blind eye and abet KSA’s behavior criticized far and wide, that includes alleged cases of torture and murder of dissenters, at home and abroad. And Al-Ahmed said in his lawsuit that these western companies behave in this way because of the vast wealth that major figures in the KSA enjoy. Media reports, meanwhile, recall that Twitter and the KSA regime enjoy close times, and that the Middle Eastern state is one of Twitter’s largest outside shareholders. Al-Ahmed has sought declaratory judgment, damages, including compensatory and punitive in his favor; but he is yet to see any movement in his court case. It is now up to Judge Caproni, who was appointed to by former President Obama and is a former FBI general counsel, to make sure that protesters and dissidents who use social networks can be sure that their data and that of their allies is protected. For some reason, Caproni has taken a year but is yet to decide whether there is merit in allowing the case to go to trial. Al-Ahmed appears to have started using Twitter as a soapbox to criticize the KSA government, specifically Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS) for the treatment of women, dissidents, and members of religions other than Islamic. It all started with the arrest of 27-year-old Red Crescent worker Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who was in 2018 sentenced to 20 years in prison for using a Twitter account of his own to mock MBS and his authorities. Al-Almed then criticized the verdict, which, according to him, to surveillance of himself and his family members, attempts to physically trap him, etc., culminating in the breach into his Twitter account and subsequent suspension. Al-Sadhan was also unmasked by the same spies that succeeded in getting Al-Ahmedi’s account hacked and then banned – and there has similarly been silence on both these cases from Twitter. |
| SELLING OUT |
| The UK government is facing pushback from politicians and rights groups over its award of a £250,000 (approximately $345,000) vaccine passport contract to a global IT firm that has previously suggested vaccine passport infrastructure be redeployed into a “national citizen ID program” and used to facilitate valuable data collection. The IT firm Entrust was awarded the contract by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) last month and tasked with providing cloud computing software for the COVID-status certification scheme that’s run by the UK government’s digital health and social care unit – NHSX. The contract is due to expire in March 2022 but it can be extended for one year, meaning Entrust could potentially work on vaccine passport schemes until early 2023. But critics are sounding the alarm over Entrust’s past statements on how vaccine passports and its previous work on national ID systems in Albania, Ghana, and Malaysia. In a February blog post, the company’s Product Marketing Director, Jenn Markey, wrote: “Vaccine credentials can become part of the infrastructure of the new normal.” The post also recommended that “any immunity passport or vaccine credential program” should “consider a national ID strategy” where the vaccine passport infrastructure is redeployed as part of a national ID program: “With the infrastructure and investment necessary to ensure a viable vaccine passport, why not redeploy this effort into a national citizen ID program that can be used for multiple purposes including the secure delivery of government services, secure cross-border travel, and documentation of vaccination.” And iNews reports that in a January webinar, Entrust’s Senior Product Manager, John Beijjani, discussed how vaccine passports could be used by governments “to collect valuable data” about citizens. “You’ll understand why it’s not just for travel, you can take it and repurpose it to do such things as national IDs and permits,” Beijjani said during the webinar. “Deploying something like a mobile travel credential also enables governments to collect valuable data. It can provide governments a quick and standard mechanism for securing their citizens. It also doesn’t hurt that this information can be used to identify criminals and other bad actors as they move around the same system trying to hide anonymously in the crowds.” David Davis, a former Cabinet minister and member of the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Conservative Members of Parliament (MPs) slammed the the UK health department for signing this contract. “The health department is able to go around signing these contracts without explicit Parliamentary permission,” Davis said. “But it is doubly extraordinary that they sign one with a company with this sinister attitude to surveillance of citizens.” Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, former director of civil liberties group Liberty, said the contract suggested ministers were trying to add vaccine passports to legislation without a proper Parliamentary debate. “This isn’t a mere question of competence but far more sinister,” Chakrabarti said. “This is studied chaos. We need to be explicitly reassured that the Government has not already decided in favour of some kind of national ID system.” Jake Hurfurt, head of research at privacy and civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, warned that “Covid certificates would introduce ID cards in the UK by the backdoor” and branded them a “serious threat” to privacy and civil liberties: “The fact that the government has done a deal with Entrust, a company which is openly plotting a route from vaccine passports to digital identity cards, only underlines what a serious threat Covid passes would be to our civil liberties and our privacy.” The UK government claims that it’s currently reviewing vaccine passports for entry to large-scale events with the UK. It also introduced vaccine passports for Euro 2020 at Wembley as part of what it claims to be a trial. However, the multi-year length of vaccine passport contracts and their associated privacy policies have raised concerns that they’re going to become a permanent fixture in the UK. For example, a previous version of the privacy policy for the National Health Service (NHS) app’s “Covid Status Certificate” program stated that data from this program would be used after lockdowns end for “attendance at domestic events.” These concerns have been compounded by other stories including UK vaccine recipients being secretly surveilled and a retweet from UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock referring to COVID passport skeptics as “crazies.” Despite the mounting apprehension and criticism of the UK’s vaccine passport contracts, the government insists the NHS app (which is currently used to demonstrate proof of vaccination) will not be used to implement national ID. “The NHS App is not and will not be used as a national ID system,” a DHSC spokesperson said. “The COVID-19 vaccine status service provides a simple and secure means of verifying users’ vaccination status for international travel. The service shows only a very small part of an individual’s medical record and this information is held securely by the NHS.” |
| GLOATING |
| According to former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, deplatforming works. Pao, who became infamous for her pro-censorship policies when she was Reddit’s CEO, said that in response to a study that found that conservative groups’ popularity decreased when they were deplatformed on mainstream platforms such as YouTube. “Deplatforming hate works,” Pao wrote on Twitter. “It worked on reddit in 2015, and now it’s working on YouTube.” |
| Her tweet was a reply to another tweet containing a link to a study that found out that “deplatforming is effective in minimizing the reach of far-right channels like Alex Jones & cannot be compensated on alternative platforms.” Pao was Reddit’s CEO for a few months, between November 2014 and July 2015. During her brief tenure, she earned the nickname “Chairman Pao” for her strict pro-censorship policies that changed the culture of the platform. There was backlash over what users saw as her dismantling Reddit’s commitment to free speech. Moderators on user-run communities even staged boycotts, dubbed “Reddit Revolt.” Even after leaving the platform, Reddit never got back to what it once was, a platform that once welcomed and encouraged wide-ranging free speech. For instance, in 2020, the platform removed The_Donald, which was one of the largest pro-Trump communities on the internet. |
| BANNED |
| altCensored, a platform that archives videos that have been censored or limited by YouTube, has been booted by the fan-funding platform Patreon for “hate speech.” The platform has received around 500,000 unique monthly visitors over the last year, according to estimates based on web analytics company SimilarWeb and altCensored’s server logs. And altCensored had turned to Patreon to help cover its web hosting costs. “We depended on Patreon to mainly cover around $100 a month in hosting,” altCensored told Reclaim The Net. “We are just trying to document removed material from YouTube and cover our hosting costs as we do it.” But in an email to the platform, Patreon accused altCensored of violating its community guidelines on hate speech and alleged that altCensored had hosted content that propagates “negative stereotypes or segregational content towards protected communities.” The email doesn’t point to any specific videos or cite any specific examples of how altCensored allegedly violated these hate speech rules. |
| altCensored said it hasn’t appealed the ban yet but is “not optimistic about reversing their decision.” While alternative fan funding platforms and tools exist, it’s often difficult for creators and sites to attract equivalent levels of donations through these alternatives. The Mastercard and Visa duopoly is fast becoming the biggest threat to alternative tech Patreon’s deplatforming of altCensored follows Facebook blocking image previews on links to altCensored last year. |
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