A global coalition of more than three dozen groups on Monday launched a campaign to ban surveillance advertising, which the leaders of the effort described as “the extractive profit model underlying so many of Big Tech’s worst behaviors.”
“Surveillance advertising — the core profit-driver for gatekeepers like Facebook and Google, as well as adtech middlemen — is the practice of extensively tracking and profiling individuals and groups, and then microtargeting ads at them based on their behavioral history, relationships, and identity” the coalition — co-organized by Accountable Tech and the American Economic Liberties Project — said in a joint statement.
“These dominant firms curate the content each person sees on their platforms using those dossiers — not just the ads, but newsfeeds, recommendations, trends and so forth — to keep each user hooked, so they can be served more ads and mined for more data,” added the coalition — which also includes Demand Progress, People’s Action and Public Citizen.
“Big Tech is making billions off surveillance advertising,” the groups noted on their campaign website. “Society is paying the price.”
The coalition of nearly 40 organizations — whose advocacy ranges from antitrust, corporate accountability and consumer protection to privacy, civil rights and counter-disinformation — argued that by “funding the misinformation machine,” “aiding and abetting violent extremists,” and more “Big Tech’s toxic business model is undermining democracy.”
In their joint statement released ahead of the March 25 House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on “Social Media’s Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation,” the groups said that “Big Tech platforms amplify hate, illegal activities and conspiracism — and feed users increasingly extreme content — because that’s what generates the most engagement and profit.”
“Their own algorithmic tools have boosted everything from white supremacist groups and Holocaust denialism to COVID-19 hoaxes, counterfeit opioids and fake cancer cures,” the coalition added. “Echo chambers, radicalization and viral lies are features of these platforms, not bugs — central to the business model.”
The coalition criticized social media giants for “eroding our consensus reality and threatening public safety in service of a toxic, extractive business model.”
Big Tech ‘Making Billions’ Off Surveillance Advertising | Children’s Health Defense
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Mike Pence Joins Think Tank to Help ‘Lead the Conservative Movement Into the Future’
Former Vice President Mike Pence will join the Heritage Foundation, where he will advise on public policy issues and help propel the conservative movement forward, the think tank said in a statement. “I am profoundly honored to join them as a distinguished visiting fellow to advance conservative policies that will benefit every American,” Pence said on Twitter. Heritage stated that Pence will advise its experts on public policy issues, deliver a series of speeches, and help the think tank “lead the conservative movement into the future.” Pence will also contribute a monthly column for The Daily Signal, the organization’s multimedia news outlet. “I look forward to rolling up my sleeves and working with the all-star team at Heritage as we continue to take the case for a strong national defense, free markets and traditional values to policymakers across the Nation and to every American who cherishes our Heritage of Freedom,” Pence …
LAA’s Braynard Calls on Stark County, OH to Reject ‘Black Box’ Voting Equipment Contract
Today, Look Ahead America Executive Director Matt Braynard urged the public, particularly in Ohio, to warn the Board of Elections of Stark County, Ohio, not to move ahead with their $6 million dollar purchase of Dominion Voting Equipment.
Said Braynard, “It is unconscionable for any free election to be run on “black box” voting equipment where both the software and hardware are proprietary and the code that runs them is not available for public inspection. And any elected official who thinks it is acceptable to purchase voting equipment is as qualified to have their job as a mechanic who thinks it is acceptable to put water in your Chevy’s gas tank.
“Over and over again after the 2020 General Election, executives from companies that sold black box voting equipment told government officials who asked questions about how their machines operated that they could not answer because the software was a ‘proprietary’ company secret.
A PDF version of this statement can be found here.
A Note To Readers About This Week
It has been just slightly more than three months since I resigned from The Intercept to return to independent journalism. These last three months have been intense and, even more so, exhilarating — largely due to the incredible and gratifying support from readers, for which I am deeply thankful. But the intensity of the last three months is also due to …
Former CBP Commissioner: Biden’s Border Strategy Is ‘Release, Protect, Reward’
WASHINGTON—Former Acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan left his role at noon on Jan. 20. He had been in the position since early July 2019. During the final months of the Obama administration, Morgan also served as the Border Patrol chief. Morgan spoke to The Epoch Times about the flurry of border security-related executive orders and memos issued by President Joe Biden and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These include temporarily suspending deportations of illegal aliens, reversing President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from terror-prone countries, halting border wall construction, stopping the addition of asylum-seekers to the Migrant Protection Protocol program, preserving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and releasing a sweeping immigration package to Congress that includes amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. The Epoch Times: As a critic of Biden’s actions on immigration, which one do you see as most detrimental so far? …
January 30, 2021
The Nation Speaks
The Nation Speaks
Critical Race Theory, Cancel Culture & the Chinese Communist Party: Where is it all heading? Immigration, Crime & Justice in the Biden Administration.
LAA’s Braynard Discusses H.R.1 on OAN
LAA Executive Director joined Dan Ball last night to talk about the problems with H.R. 1, where he discusses problems with this legislation you haven’t heard anywhere else.
LAA ED Braynard Calls on DOJ, FBI To Drop Charges Against Non-Violent Capitol Protestors
Today, LAA Executive Director Matt Braynard sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Wilkinson and FBI Director Wray asking them to drop the charges against non-violent protestors from the January 6th rally at the U.S. Capitol.
“There is no excuse for violence or destruction of property, and I support the prosecution of those individuals who engaged in such activity,” said Matt Braynard. “However, I do not support the Biden Administration using those few bad apples as an excuse to persecute the peaceful Trump supporters who entered the Capitol with selective prosecutions based on their political beliefs.
“Many of the protesters who entered the Capitol reasonably believed they had permission. As videos show, police officers opened the protective fencing around the Capitol and stood aside as crowds entered the building. While some of these men and women should have known better, the majority of them were political neophytes who simply viewed this as an extension of the peaceful protest. They had no intention to destroy property or harm anyone. They may have been naive, but were not acting maliciously. Whatever the crimes, they do not deserve jail time and financial ruin due to legal costs for such a minor offense.
“I have a message to the non-violent protestors who entered the capitol: DON’T DO THAT AGAIN.
“Believe me, I understand your frustration over the 2020 general election. What I am asking you and anyone else who is angry about what happened is to channel that anger into productive, legal activism to help us save our country. Help me. Help me and the other volunteers at Look Ahead America to advocate for reforms in your home state to ensure voter integrity. Help me to register, educate, and turn out to vote disaffected patriots just like yourself. Together, we can make the American Dream their dream— and your dream— again.”
VIDEO: The Reddit Revolution, GameStop and Melvin Capital
A remarkable series of events culminated in at least one major Wall Street hedge fund on the verge of insolvency and widespread anxiety and even panic from the titans of the financial system. It was all initiated on a sub-group of Reddit known for its heterodox interest in stock markets, video games, and vaguely populist politics.
Purposely targeting the stock of a company that had long been written off by Wall Street and which short sellers had decided to ravage — the video game retailer GameStop — these small investors, many apparently working class or debt-ridden, banded together to drive up the stock price of that company into the stratosphere, abruptly leaving the hedge fund short-sellers with billions of dollars in losses.
Although it may be more complex than this once all the facts are all known, this is being treated — by those excited by it and those aghast — as a type of populist uprising, a David v. Goliath tale in which ordinary people united to brilliantly beat Wall Street at its own game, thereby transferring plutocratic wealth back to the public. Oligarchs and their media spokespeople spent all day on CNBC and other pro-Wall-Street outlets expressing outrage and demanding government intervention to protect them from what they regard as this grave injustice.
And the sub-Reddit has now been banned by at least one platform, on the highly suspicious ground that it was due to “hate speech” and not the use of this group to sabotage Wall Street billionaires (what a remarkable coincidence of timing that this sub-Reddit’s “hate speech” suddenly crossed a line exactly as hedge fund managers were demanding their heads; the page continues, however, to appear on Reddit itself).
In the video below, I discuss what happened and what the implications are. One note about the video: though I do discuss the amorphous and trans-ideological politics driving both the Reddit uprising and the reaction to it, that topic in particular merits much more consideration. Liberal journalists and pundits love to mock the idea that “economic anxiety” drives anything remotely adjacent to right-wing populism — the primary drivers are racism and other types of bigotry, they insist in unison — yet all one has to do is spend any non-trivial amount of time in that sub-Reddit to see genuine and significant levels of rational economic anger often quite untethered, even hostile, to left-liberal cultural pieties and political niceties. Given their recent noble success, everyone now wants to claim these Redditors as their own, but their politics, like many people’s, defy the clean left-right dichotomy on which the professional media and punditry classes depend, the only prism through which they can understand the world.
This is one of the most interesting and potentially significant events — not just financially but culturally and politically — to happen in some time, and I try here to explain the key components and highlight some of the most consequential implications [note that this video was filmed late last night before the banning of the sub-Reddit by Discord on obviously specious grounds and, far worse, the corrupted banning this morning by major trading platforms, including RobinHood, of any attempts to buy GameStop and other targeted stocks while still allowing them to be sold: the ultimate expression of what should be illegal market manipulation to protect hedge funds]: