Podcast puts words in Maxine Waters mouth, questions Zuckerberg and talks about indigenous identity

BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
Podcast puts words in Maxine Waters mouth, questions Zuckerberg and talks about indigenous identity
/

First up I’m talking about Maxine Waters asking Zuckerberg about the Crypto Ad Ban which forms the basis of @jpbliberty‘s Crypto Class Action court case in Australia. You can see that clip here on 3speak. This is a watershed moment, it’s by far and away the most important mainstream mention of this action taken by the tech Goliaths.

I’m also talking more generally about Zuckerberg’s recent interviews and his speech at Georgetown University.

Finally I address Indigenous Identity very briefly.

Happy to see comments and answer questions down below! Let me know what you think about any of this.

The Maxine Waters clip on C-Span is here:

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

⭐️ Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

🏅 You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

Facebook has an army looking for foreign interference: who can police Wikipedia?

Over at Israellycool last night Dave published the following pretty astonishing post by Mike G:

Unsurprisingly, this bias to the left also extends to a systematic bias against Israel. One key way in which Wikipedia is systematically biased against Israel is related to the website’s fundamental policy that all information presented in its articles be verified through the use of citations to “reliable sources.” The problem, therein, is that on Wikipedia what are considered reliable sources are generally “legacy media” (e.g. The New York Times) and works from academia, both of which are already known for their own systematic bias against Israel.

Within Wikipedia, like in the broader public sphere, matters related to Israel are controversial and fraught with disputes, resulting in a highly disproportionate amount of time and energy being consumed on this subject on the site. Due to these long-standing disputes, Wikipedia has adopted special rules governing editing articles related to the Arab–Israeli conflict (other controversial subjects are also subject to special editing restrictions, including abortion, the Syrian Civil War, and global warming).

Veteran anti-Israel editors are adept at gaming the system by using these special rules to limit the influence and efficacy of pro-Israel editors, if not to get them outright banned from editing in the topic area or from all of Wikipedia.

Incidentally, when I tweeted about this story (which was retweeted by OAN anchor and journalist Jack Posobiec) I got back a typical response from an Israel hater:

You and I both know this is nonsense, since the Israel gov’t pays to have pro-Zionist articles..

This tweeter linked to an old, old video story from 2010 about a single training day to teach people how to edit in Wikipedia. I seem to remember I might have been invited to it. The first person on the video is Naftali Bennet back when he was running Yesha Council which wasn’t a significant Israeli government backed institution even back then. I absolutely know for sure there is no determined or co-ordinated “Zionist” effort paid for by the Israeli government to counter the bias on Wikipedia though I wish there was!

I’ve known for a long time that Wikipedia entries on Israel (and often on Jewish matters too) are very slanted. It’s not always the most obvious of lies but it is every form of deceptive framing, suppression of explanatory background and nearly always geared to make the Israel look bad.

This coincides with something David Collier has just published about a text book used to teach about Israel to UK school children:This book has NO PLACE inside a classroom. It is poisonous – it rewrites history – it whitewashes anti-Jewish violence – and every child who has studied from it – has been exposed to hard-core anti-Zionist revisionist material. Faithfully delivered to them by their teacher, their school and the taxpayer.

‘In August 1929, angry clashes occurred over holy sites in Jerusalem. These grew into 4 days of bloody riots and mob violence throughout Palestine, leaving 133 Jews and 116 Arabs dead.’

Here is one example from the book. The year is 1929.

That is how the ‘school’ book describes the bloody massacres of Jewish communities as Arab mobs ran riot throughout Mandatory Palestine. As ‘Arab / Jew’ clashes:

school textbook

The comparable fatality count is more than deceptive. The reason 116 Arabs died, is because the British killed them as they tried to stop them massacring Jews.

This trick used with the fatality count is an absolutely textbook (excuse me) method of reframing to demonise Jews and whitewash the actions of those who murder Jews. This is the kind of thing that is all over Wikipedia. Which is why it comes as no surprise in Collier’s full report that some of this textbook is even sourced from Wikipedia (something the school kids are told not to do!).

School by Wikipedia extract from David Collier’s report on UK Pearson Textbook.

Now lets cross reference this with something in the New York Times:

In his conference call on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said that Facebook had become better able to seek out and remove foreign influence networks, relying on a team of former intelligence officials, digital forensics experts and investigative journalists. Facebook has more than 35,000 people working on its security initiatives, with an annual budget well into the billions of dollars.

“Three years ago, big tech companies like Facebook were essentially in denial about all of this,” said Ben Nimmo, head of investigations at Graphika, a social media analytics agency. “Now, they’re actively hunting.”

Facebook is a huge money spinner: Wikipedia begs for donations (though it has some pretty rich sustaining donors from (left leaning) Silicon Valley.

There is no way Wikipedia can ever invest the fortune that Facebook is spending every year on security and weeding out deceptive content. I would contend that Facebook’s model is heading away from profitability too but its immense market power will ensure that it remains profitable for a long time to come.

I believe Wikipedia is a much bigger problem for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment than any of the social media fights we hear a lot more about. In many respects, corruption of this kind of long standing reference material is going to be a far bigger societal problem than ephemeral social media posts and adverts.

Podcast talks about itself and Mark Zuckerberg’s new found free speech zeal at Facebook

BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
Podcast talks about itself and Mark Zuckerberg’s new found free speech zeal at Facebook
/

Are you listening to me as a Podcast? Please let me know if you want this to continue. I’m seriously considering switching only to publishing on Steem. The simple fact is that’s a lot easier than maintaining my own WordPress site.

I also spoke about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his new push toward free speech (or so he says). There’s a lot more to say on this, I’m listening to him in his Fox News interview as I type this.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

⭐️ Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

🏅 You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

Podcast deconstructs the Danish Facebook Tommy Robinson spokeshole massacre

BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
Podcast deconstructs the Danish Facebook Tommy Robinson spokeshole massacre
/

Last week Tommy posted this full video from a Danish TV show questioning a Facebook Spokeshole all about the secondary effects of banning Tommy Robinson from Facebook. Specifically the observable fact that if you even mention Tommy Robinson by name, your post is likely to be removed. If you continue to do this your account will be deleted.

In this podcast I go over the transcript pointing out some of the astonishing details of what was said. The transcript comes from Gates of Vienna (one of the oldest and best counter Jihad blogs in the world). Many thanks to Tania Groth for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling.

Here are some of the points I make:

  • Lotte is the first journalists to ask Facebook directly for the evidence of what it claimed he did to deserve to be removed.
  • Facebook haven’t ever produced screenshots of problematic posts and can’t produce them.
  • The claims made by Facebook can’t be confirmed by any journalists.
  • The process by which people are chosen to be removed is entirely internal within Facebook though they may consult “experts”.
  • No details of these processes will be provided to journalists.
  • Facebook wishes there were global rules for “hate speech”.
  • Facebook is not content to just apply rules against illegal speech, they must go much further and prevent people being harmed by “hate speech”.

Facebook is unfit to be running their network with the kind of power they have. My personal belief is that the world does not need it and Facebook is indeed a massive danger to all free societies. Centralised control and power such that Mark Zuckerberg wields, is too dangerous. I wrote more about Zuckerberg here.

If you’re interested in a legal effort to challenge Facebook (in a way that could inflict a financial blow on them which could threaten the existence of the entire company, take a look at this post.

The full original interview with subtitles is here on the Rair Foundation Website.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

⭐️ Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

🏅 You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

What happens when you reply to Donald Trump and tell him not to trust China?

Yesterday Trump tweeted the following congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people for the 70th anniversary of the cultural revolution which murdered millions of people:

So I responded with a tweet invoking my friend Avi Yemini’s now famous internet meme:

https://twitter.com/brianoflondon/status/1178986800024637442

If you don’t know the video you can see that in Avi’s tweet which he put up just a few minutes behind mine:

https://twitter.com/OzraeliAvi/status/1178988733120466946

But what interests me is the utter failure of Google Translate to come up with anything approaching a passable translation of all the insults that were hurled my way by an army of Chinese twitter accounts, bots or not.

I’ll start with just about the only one that Google Translate gets right.

“Why didn’t Hitler kill you?”

Food seems to be a common theme.

"Your mom will buy food within three days.”
“Your mom will buy food within three days.”

Once again food purchasing, but this time with chess! Is an accusation of playing chess a reference to the cultural revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois middle class?

“Your dad will be accused of playing chess, your mother must double the purchase of food.”
“Your dad will be accused of playing chess, your mother must double the purchase of food.”

Now we move on to the medicine section with some capitalism hate thrown in.

“Your mother will buy medicine and will increase the price.”
“Your mother will buy medicine and will increase the price.”

Insults about being a poor family man?

“Your mother as not taught you how to call your grandson?"
“Your mother as not taught you how to call your grandson?”

And we’ll end with possibly my favourite purely because it is so obviously completely without meaning.

“Your dad sells eucalyptus”
“Your dad sells eucalyptus”

How on earth can anyone claim that the world is anywhere near approaching some kind of useful, general Artificial Intelligence when the wealthiest company in the world can’t even begin to translate what are probably common curses from a language spoken by a billion people?

P.S. if anyone can actually read Chinese characters and give me real translations I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.