Censorship

Even beyond the United States, other countries’ governments are censoring reproductive health information. In Argentina, where abortion remains legal, Google has blocked ads regarding reproductive health.

Advocates also cite widespread misinformation as a dangerous threat for those seeking information about reproductive care. Crisis pregnancy centers (CPC), facilities that misleadingly represent themselves as reproductive health care clinics but do not provide abortion services, have spent $10 million on Google ads within the last two years. After many CPC ads were reported for disinformation, Google “claimed to have removed particular ads for fake clinics that violated its policies, but they did not take action on the systemic issues with fake clinic ads.”

"And what is the actual evidence for this cruel accusation? In addition to that, keep in mind that most psychiatrists aren’t to be trusted unless you are Peter Breggin… I see a pattern that is thousands of years old, anyone who exposes wickedness of people, they accuse him as mentally ill.. Happened to the prophets.. Also happened to many activists all over the world.. How else are they going to trick the public?"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1078356

During spring 2021, Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists took to social media to condemn the evictions of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Subsequently, activists who condemned the evictions and journalists who covered them faced account suspensions and restrictions on social media, Nadda Osman reported for Middle East Eye.

Mona Shtaya of 7amleh told Osman that these restrictions were part of a longstanding pattern: “Annually there are tens of thousands of requests that the [neocolonial] cyber unit [sends] to social media companies in an attempt to silence Palestinians. The number of requests is increasing annually. In 2019 [the neocolony] made 19,606 requests from the cyber unit to social media companies regarding content takedowns.”

Repression of Palestinian speech online could soon get much worse. In a January 18, 2022, article for the Jordan Times, Ramzy Baroud revealed that [the neocolony’s] minister of justice, Gideon Sa’ar, is pushing legislation known as the “Facebook Law.” The legislation would grant [the neocolony’s] courts broad powers to remove online content deemed to be “inflammatory” or harmful to the security of the state from social media or “any website at all.”

Although the law ostensibly prohibits all violent, hateful rhetoric posted online, the Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition and the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council issued a statement opposing the legislation on the grounds that it would be used in a discriminatory manner and ultimately “increase the muzzling of Palestinian voices and advocacy for the Palestinian cause on social media platforms.”

Although Abu Akleh’s murder was widely covered, the systematic repression of Palestinian journalists and the silencing of Palestinian expression on social media has been largely ignored by the establishment press. The arrest of dozens of Palestinian journalists detailed in Abraham’s Intercept article never made it onto the corporate news media’s radar. There have been scattered reports in the corporate press about censorship of Palestinian activists on social media.

The Washington Post published a May 2021 article about Palestinians being blocked on social media. The same month NBC News reported on Palestinian accusations of censorship against social media platforms. ABC News ran an October 2021 story about leaked Facebook documents recording its employees’ concerns about restrictions on content about Palestine. With the exception of publications focused specifically on [the neocolony] or the Middle East, there has been no discussion in the corporate media of [the neocolony’s] so-called “Facebook Law.”

VPNs have become a huge market in recent years, with all of them offering essentially the same service but branded differently.

I've talked about VPNs before and how you likely don't need one if all you care about is "privacy". Otherwise it has some usecases for like downloading torrents or accessing geo-blocked content but that's about it.

To synthesize, the VPN owners can see what you do instead of your ISP when you use a VPN. You better trust that they don't keep logs and encrypt your traffic.

Who do you trust more, some VPN company, or your ISP? That's a personal question only you can answer.

Privacy and "security" is what VPNs advertise heavily on. Security is nonsense from their part; there is no additional security to using a VPN. NordVPN for example likes to talk about the evil hackers in starbucks that will hack your wifi, but that literally never happens (not never never but not enough to justify paying them money for it).

In any case, all VPN rankings omit one very important fact: fed involvement. that's security 101.

The CIA controlled an encryption company for decades (established after WW2): Crypto AG. They sold encryption machines to embassies around the world under this name, and it was only found out they were CIA in the 2010s.

We've known since Snowden about backdoors in Windows that allow the NSA to bypass encryption and spy on anyone they want.

And it's a very glaring issue. Look at any of those rankings and they'll talk about privacy and encryption protocols, and never once mention potential fed involvement or other causes for concern.

Even worse, if they do talk about it, they often talk about "Chinese" involvement. How the fuck did the discourse get so bad in just 10 years? They don't even have anything to back it up. Meanwhile we have evidence of NSA and CIA involvement in encryption and surveillance.

NordVPN especially is strange. They advertise a LOT and always sell at a discount (which makes the VPN cheaper than most competition). ProtonVPN too, I don't trust anything Proton ever since they surrendered info to the feds about one of their clients (an eco-activist). Secondly they are a "Swiss" company like Crypto AG, but were not founded by Swiss people.

So again, who do you trust more? Some VPN company trying to sell you a product under false pretences, or your local ISP company?

How long till he quits twitter?

Some months ago I tried to make posts that link to Lemmygrad; but Reddit removed them because it got counted as "spam". (Most posts got removed by mods.)

Sometime later, I also remember trying to post a link to https://join-lemmy.org; but Reddit removed that link too.

I sense that Reddit is trying to censor Lemmy.

Now, it has come to my attention over the years, that youtube has very specific designs that make political propaganda more effective, I want to create a master list of functions that are omitted and functions that are included to make it less useable, less functional and less open/free as it could be/should be.

just to note the most basic:

ALGORYTHMIC SUPPRESSION OF ANTIWAR/LEFTIST/HISTORY CONTENT

Search function that does not allow proper setting of specifics

Search results filled with non-search related videos

Video suggestions being pushed constantly, specifically rightwing content (Jordan Peterson, Peter Molyneux, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool, Joe Rogan(not himself rightwing but 99% of his guests)

300.000 bot accounts that autofill new think tank financed influencers likes to amp them to the search suggestion feed

comment replies are not forwarded to you, so the last answer to a pinned comment can be overridden by whataboutist bots to be invisible to the next user

No option to BLOCK content properly, I cannot create a term based filter-list as in ANY email application in existence. NOT POSSIBLE ON YOUTUBE ON PURPOSE

Now: fill me in on your experiences