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House Weaponization Committee: Biden Admin ‘Colluded’ With Big Tech, ‘Facilitated the Censorship of Americans’
The House Weaponization Subcommittee says the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has “facilitated the censorship of Americans directly” and through third-party intermediaries during the Biden administration.
Fox News Digital first obtained a new committee report Monday, stemming from the panel’s ongoing investigation into government-induced censorship on social media. The report focuses on CISA’s alleged work ahead of the 2020 election and the 2022 midterm elections.
The committee, led by Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, obtained non-public documents which lawmakers say reveal CISA “expanded its mission to surveil Americans’ speech on social media, colluded with Big Tech and government-funded third parties to censor by proxy, and tried to hide its plainly unconstitutional activities from the public.”
The report states that CISA engaged in “surveillance,” by expanding its mission from cybersecurity to monitor foreign “disinformation” to eventually monitor “all ‘disinformation,’ including Americans’ speech.”
It also says CISA “exploited its connections with Big Tech and government-funded non-profits to censor, by proxy, in order to circumvent the First Amendment’s prohibition against government-induced censorship.” Specifically — the report says CISA-funded entities created reporting portals that “funneled ‘misinformation’ reports from the government directly to social media platforms.”
Amazon Delays Virtual Care Service’s Unveiling After Senators Raised Privacy Concerns
Amazon is delaying the launch of a major expansion of its Amazon Clinic telemedicine service due to lawmakers’ concerns about its privacy practices that POLITICO detailed last week. According to an email from a person with direct knowledge subsequently obtained by POLITICO, Amazon will hold off on a promotional campaign for three weeks, till July 19.
Currently, Amazon Clinic is available in 33 states and leans on asynchronous care, meaning patients fill out a form to get treated for conditions like urinary tract infections, acid reflux and pink eye as well as to receive emergency contraception and birth control.
Amazon had planned to announce a 50-state launch of synchronous care — treatment provided via live video — on Tuesday. An Amazon spokesperson denied that there was any “delay as a result of an external inquiry.”
But the email says Amazon is delaying promotional activity because of POLITICO reporting on a letter from Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that raised concerns that the company is “harvesting” health data from patients. In the letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the lawmakers pointed to recent reporting that Amazon Clinic requires patients to sign a release giving the company “complete” access to their health information.
By signing, customers authorize Amazon to share their data and acknowledge that it’s not protected by HIPAA, the federal health privacy law.
From Merck to Microsoft: These Are the Companies That BlackRock ‘Controls’ the Most of
A week after an employee of the world’s largest asset management company, BlackRock, described how the company attempts to stay out of the media spotlight while buying politicians and profiting off of war (according to undercover footage obtained by the O’Keefe Media Group), we thought it worth a look at just what companies does the 34-year-old company have the most control of.
As a reminder, in footage secretly recorded by undercover journalists in New York, a BlackRock recruiter named Serge Varlay explains how the investment company is able to “run the world.” “They [BlackRock] don’t want to be in the news. They don’t want people to talk about them. They don’t want to be anywhere on the radar,” Varlay said.
Varlay told an OMG journalist in the footage that BlackRock manages $20 trillion worldwide (it’s actually around $9 trillion).“It’s incomprehensible numbers,” he said.
As expected, BlackRock’s top equity holdings include America’s most established tech companies: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. BlackRock also has large positions in Nvidia and Broadcom, which happen to be America’s two largest semiconductor companies. Given Nvidia’s incredible YTD performance (198% as of June 19th), this position has likely grown even bigger.
Hundreds of Military Personnel Part of Lawsuit Over Mandatory COVID Vaccine Policy
More than 300 Canadian Armed Forces members are listed as plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against Canada’s defense minister and top brass over the military’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policies.
Filed in federal court last week, the court action demands $1 million in damages for each of the 329 plaintiffs, plus declarations that mandating COVID shots for CAF members violated the rights of Canadian military members, plus punitive recompense.
Last April, Lt.-Gen. Allen told the House national defense committee that of the over 1,300 Canadian Forces personnel who at that time applied for vaccination exemptions, only 158 were approved.
“When mandatory vaccination became a requirement for both entry into the Canadian Forces and for service in the Canadian Forces, we set out to have our people vaccinated or committed to have every individual fill out an attestation as to their vaccination status,” she told committee members at the time.
COVID Restrictions Did More Harm Than Good
Ronald Reagan famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” What an apt summation of the government’s heavy-handed efforts to fight the coronavirus.
The Institute of Economic Affairs recently published a book on the effectiveness of pandemic lockdowns. The authors include a professor from Johns Hopkins and a professor emeritus from Lund University in Sweden. “The results of our meta-analysis support the conclusion that lockdowns in the spring of 2020 had a negligible effect on COVID-19 mortality,” they wrote. “This result is consistent with the view that voluntary changes in behavior, such as social distancing, did play an important role in mitigating the pandemic.”
In 2019, fewer than 71,000 people died from drug overdoses. In 2020, that number spiked up to more than 91,000. Tragically, it isn’t coming down. Last year, it increased to 109,000. There are many factors in overdose deaths, including the rise of fentanyl, but it’s foolish to think lockdowns didn’t contribute to them. Suicide and homicide rates have increased since 2019, too. This suggests it’s probable that the side effects of lockdowns will produce more American deaths than were saved by the restrictions.
There were other factors to consider. Online learning was a disaster. The Nation’s Report Card showed the pandemic and school closures wiped away 20 years of learning gains. The best students lost a little ground, but the lowest-performing students saw their scores fall four times as far. This makes them more likely to drop out of school and suffer later consequences. Those results will take decades to unfold, but they’re real.
“In the final analysis, these infringements generated negligible public health benefits while imposing a set of massive costs on society,” the authors note. They correctly call the lockdowns “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions.”
Meta Rolls Out Expansive New Parental Controls for Instagram and Messenger
Meta is launching a suite of new parental controls for both Instagram and Messenger, the company announced on Tuesday. The new tools give parents the ability to see how much time their child is spending on Messenger, as well as gain more insight into how well their teen really knows the people they’re following on Instagram (and who follows them).
On Instagram, parents can expect similar updates. That includes a new way to see how many friends their child has in common with whoever they’re following, along with whoever follows them. This could help parents monitor whether their teen is in contact with strangers. Meta says teens will also now receive a prompt when they block someone, which will suggest allowing a parent to supervise their accounts.
As concerns grow over the effect that social media sites like Facebook and Instagram have on their young users, Meta has been rolling out more robust parental controls and safety features for its family of apps. Some of those include Quiet Mode on Instagram, notifications that steer kids away from the content they continuously look at on the app, and features to keep adults out of minors’ DMs.
TikTok Gives Parents Personalized Control Over the Content Their Teens See
TikTok is bringing its content filtering tool to its Family Pairing offering, which lets parents link their accounts to their teen’s to enable content and privacy settings, the company announced on Tuesday. Content filtering allows users to filter out videos with words or hashtags they don’t want to see in their For You or Following feeds.
By bringing content filtering to Family Pairing, TikTok says it will allow parents to help reduce the likelihood of their teen “viewing content they may uniquely find jarring.” The official rollout comes as revealed that it was working on this functionality back in March.
Musk’s Twitter Faces Millions in Fines After New ‘Disinformation’ Laws Released in Australia
Elon Musk’s Twitter and other social media giants face the prospect of billions in fines after the Australian government released new laws targeting “misinformation and disinformation.”
Following a months-long process, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland released the draft legislation that will grant the country’s media regulatory body, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), greater powers to stamp out harmful content online. The federal opposition has earmarked concerns around how ACMA will determine what is “mis- or disinformation.”
“This is a complex area of policy, and government overreach must be avoided,” said David Coleman, the shadow communications minister. “The public will want to know exactly who decides whether a particular piece of content is ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation.’
“The significant penalties associated with this legislation potentially places substantial power in the hands of government officials,” he said in a statement online.
Former WHO Adviser Sounds the Alarm on Pandemic Treaty Proposals
In a seminal discussion before the Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) in the U.K., leading health experts raised serious concerns over the World Health Organization’s (WHO) proposed Pandemic Treaty and the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). The treaty would grant the WHO surveillance and censorship powers.
Dr. David Bell, an ex-WHO medical officer, and Professor Garrett Wallace Brown, who chairs Global Health Policy at the University of Leeds, outlined how the proposals could reshape the dynamics between the WHO and its member nations and imperil critical health initiatives.
The contentious point revolves around the unprecedented authority these proposals could vest in the WHO. According to Dr. Bell, the WHO could wield the power to demand hefty financial contributions from countries, suppress scientific discourse, and enforce travel restrictions, lockdowns, and compulsory vaccinations in response to health emergencies, which the body can declare at its discretion.
