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The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent

Friday June 7, 2019

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After the failure of Newsguard — the news rating system backed by a cadre of prominent neoconservative personalities — to gain traction among American tech and social media companies, another organization has quietly stepped in to direct the news algorithms of tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Though different from Newsguard, this group, known as “The Trust Project,” has a similar goal of restoring “trust” in corporate, mainstream media outlets, relative to independent alternatives, by applying “trust indicators” to social-media news algorithms in a decidedly untransparent way. The funding of “The Trust Project” — coming largely from big tech companies like Google; government-connected tech oligarchs like Pierre Omidyar; and the Knight Foundation, a key Newsguard investor — suggests that an ulterior motive in its tireless promotion of “traditional” mainstream media outlets is to limit the success of dissenting alternatives.

Of particular importance is the fact that the Trust Project’s “trust indicators” are already being used to control what news is promoted and suppressed by top search engines like Google and Bing and massive social-media networks like Facebook. Though the descriptions of these “trust indicators” — eight of which are currently in use — are publicly available, the way they are being used by major tech and social media companies is not.
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Hate the State? You’re a Nazi Bad Actor

Thursday June 6, 2019

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It is impossible to define “white nationalism.” It is also impossible to define “hate speech,” that is unless you’re a Democrat senator or a CNN talking head.

One person’s hate speech is another person’s right to practice the First Amendment. I am free to say whatever ridiculous thing crosses my mind, according to the Bill of Rights. It’s up to you, the listener or reader, to decide if I’m a racist or sexist idiot. It’s not up to Congress, members of which swore to uphold rights enumerated in that document. It’s up to you, the individual. 

If you are offended—and so many are these days—it is your prerogative to not listen, watch, or read. 

Enter Senator Mark Warner. The Democrat from Virginia recently pounced on a favored scapegoat—YouTube. 

“Congress has focused a great deal on the ways in which Russian operatives exploited Twitter and Facebook in 2016, but an underdeveloped area has been the extent to which YouTube has been used by a range of bad actors, including far-right groups, to facilitate targeted harassment, spread extremist content, and radicalize an entire generation of young users,” Warner told The Hill.
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Pompeo Accidentally Tells Truth About Failed Venezuela Coup

Thursday June 6, 2019

Secretly recorded while speaking off the record to a group of supporters, Secretary of State Pompeo revealed that US policy toward Venezuela has been a disaster and that the US government has lied from the beginning about the level of support for the opposition and the ease of "restoring democracy" to the country. Will Pompeo be made to pay for revealing an inconvenient truth? Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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Tulsi Gabbard Pushes No War Agenda – and the Media Is Out to Kill Her Chances

Thursday June 6, 2019

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Voters looking ahead to 2020 are being bombarded with soundbites from the twenty plus Democratic would-be candidates. That Joe Biden is apparently leading the pack according to opinion polls should come as no surprise as he stands for nothing apart from being the Establishment favorite who will tirelessly work to support the status quo.

The most interesting candidate is undoubtedly Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is a fourth term Congresswoman from Hawaii, where she was born and raised. She is also the real deal on national security, having been-there and done-it through service as an officer with the Hawaiian National Guard on a combat deployment in Iraq. Though in Congress full time, she still performs her Guard duty.

Tulsi’s own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged “focus on the issue of war and peace” to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War.
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Who's The Bigger War Criminal - Duncan Hunter...Or Those Who Sent Him To Iraq?

Wednesday June 5, 2019

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) has found himself in the hot seat after defending a Navy SEAL on trial for wantonly killing civilians and stabbing prisoners while in Iraq. On a podcast, Hunter wondered what the big deal was - after all, he's responsible for hundreds of civilians killed in Fallujah. It sounds like a war crime, but perhaps the real war criminals are the neocon liars and a feckless president who sent the military into Iraq in the first place. If Hunter belongs on the dock, so does half the Bush Administration. Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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What Will the E-Verify Program Be Used to Surveil Next?

Wednesday June 5, 2019

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E-Verify is the federal government’s attempt to create an electronic national identification system. It is capable of checking government databases to verify information—often including a photo—on every US resident. Right now, the system monitors only employment and is only mandatory in some states, ostensibly to deter illegal immigration, but nothing would prevent lawmakers from expanding E-Verify to monitor identity or legal status in any other domain and restrict access based on other criteria they want.

Numerous federal, state, and local laws already require people to identify themselves or prove their immigration status, and lawmakers continue to propose many additional laws. The more areas that E-Verify is used to monitor, the more it will create a digital record of Americans’ lives—a record that lawmakers can draw upon to add further requirements for access to jobs, health care, banks, gun sales, housing, and much else.

Once E-Verify becomes fully mandatory for employment nationwide, proponents will seek to use it to enforce other laws. In 2015, the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee even voted down an amendment to a mandatory E-Verify bill that would have banned using E-Verify for purposes other than employment. This is a harbinger that the E-Verify system, if mandated federally, could be used to monitor much more than just American’s employment choices. Congress would need only make a few tweaks to the system to make it serviceable for other goals beyond jobs.
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The 'Good War'? US Bomb Kills Entire Afghan Family

Tuesday June 4, 2019

A determined father was not about to give up trying to find out how his entire family plus four cousins were killed one morning last fall. The US denied conducting any raids in the area. Then the bomb fragments were found. How many times has this tragedy been repeated in the futile 18 year war? To what end? Meanwhile, the US is shipping Blackhawk helicopters to the Afghanistan military even though no Afghan officer can fly them and the US cancelled the Afghan pilot training program because too many of them deserted once on US soil. Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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