A new search engine launched titled “Luxxle” prides itself on giving users more power when it comes to searching up content and more privacy.
“Luxxle is a search engine that provides a platform for publications of all size and voice to be discovered,” Luxxle communications director Molly Koweek told Just the News in an exclusive interview. “It’s a search engine that remains unbiased which is something you don’t have right now with the big search engines.”
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by Victor Davis Hanson A shared theme in all dystopian explorations of future and current totalitarian regimes – whether China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba – is government control of all media information, fueled by electronic surveillance. A skeptical public learns to say one thing publicly but quite another privately. It nervously nods yes at the news while at work, but at home cynically assumes the opposite of whatever is publicly said to be true. RIP, First Amendment Such electronic propaganda has sadly become characteristic of the world’s oldest consensual government. In America we once believed our First Amendment prevented a government monopoly on information. But in the age of globalization, the Internet, and social media, the state has become the enemy – not the protector – of free speech. One obvious sign is that the Biden Administration keeps trying to create new sorts of ministries of truth or “Disinformation Governance Boards.” It alleges such Orwellian censors must combat “disinformation” and “misinformation.” In fact, these bureaucracies are designed to criminalize unwanted free expression while also advancing state propaganda. Among our Washington officials, the following myths were once declared the official version of the “truth”: Mounted border patrol agents “whipped”…
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Google has offered to break apart in a bid to avoid greater punishment for antitrust violations from federal regulators, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The tech giant has raised the prospect of separating a major business operation off from Google—the auctioning and placing of online advertisements—to form a separate entity also under the umbrella of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, people close to Google reportedly told the WSJ. It was unclear if the offer would satisfy the Department of Justice (DOJ), which declined to comment on the story, according to the WSJ.
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by Victor Davis Hanson Until Donald Trump’s arrival, the globalist revolution was almost solidified and institutionalized – with the United States increasingly its greatest and most “woke” advocate. We know its bipartisan establishment contours. China would inherit the world in 20 or 30 years. The self-appointed task of American elites – many of whom had already been enriched and compromised by Chinese partners and joint ventures – was to facilitate this all-in-the-family transition in the manner of the imperial British hand-off of hegemony to the United States in the late 1940s. Our best and brightest like the Biden family, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg would enlighten us about the “real” China, so we yokels would not fall into Neanderthal bitterness as they managed our foreordained decline. We would usher China into “the world community” – grimacing at, but overlooking the destruction it wrought on the global commercial order and the American interior. We would politely forget about Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and the Uyghurs. Hollywood would nod as it put out more lucrative comic-book and cartoonish films for the Chinese markets, albeit with mandated lighter-skinned actors. The NBA would nod twice and trash a democratic United…
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by Peter Hasson and Chris White Department of Justice investigators who are conducting an antitrust probe targeting Google do not appear to be scrutinizing claims that the tech giant manipulates its search function, leaks about the probe and a source familiar with it indicate. Google critics argue that Google Search must be a focus of the investigation, pointing to the company’s sheer dominance in the market: Google consistently accounts for roughly 90% of online information searches, and company employees have expressed a willingness to artificially manipulate search results on the platform. Google did not comment on allegations of search bias, or on the pending antitrust investigation. “We continue to engage with the ongoing investigations led by the Department of Justice and Attorney General Paxton, and we don’t have any updates or comments on speculation,” Google spokeswoman Julie McAlister told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The company’s goal is focusing on the kind of products that serve customers and support businesses, she added. Google’s search feature can potentially skew a major national election toward one candidate over another, according to Robert Epstein, a research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. Research he published in 2017 suggests Google’s bias affected the vote in the 2016 election.…
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The ground is shifting quickly beneath our feet when it comes to tech, privacy, and power. And, although tech companies, their advocates, and even some policymakers, would like us to imagine these issues are cut and dried, they are not.
In their book The Sovereign Individual, published on the eve of the year 2000, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg attempt to grapple with the forthcoming technological changes that the new millennium inevitably would bring. “As technology revolutionizes the tools we use,” they wrote, “it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions.”
This is the dynamic that has been unfolding slowly over the last 20 years, as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have transformed how we engage with communications, culture, commerce, and one another.
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by Kaylee Greenlee Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced recently on Twitter the “need” for a federal investigation into the popular Russia-based image-editing technology for smartphones called “FaceApp.” “BIG: Share if you used #FaceApp: The FBI and FTC must look into the national security and privacy risks now because millions of Americans have used it; it’s owned by a Russian company; and users are required to provide full, irrevocable access to their personal photos and data,” Schumer said in his tweet. FaceApp allows users to morph an uploaded photo to make the subject appear older, younger, or even a different gender or ethnicity. View this post on Instagram Best caption wins ovo tickets A post shared by champagnepapi (@champagnepapi) on Jul 16, 2019 at 1:36am PDT FaceApp’s terms and conditions state: You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you. Yaroslav Goncharov, a chief executive at Wireless Lab, started developing FaceApp…
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by Chris White Two of the country’s staunchest big tech critics are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate social media companies’ perceived censorship practices. Facebook, Google and Twitter exercise lots of influence on Americans and they also use their tools to censor some content while amplifying others, Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote in a letter Monday to the FTC. They are asking the agency to open a public probe into the impact such policies have on people. “Companies that are this big and that have the potential to threaten democracy this much should not be allowed to curate content entirely without any transparency,” they wrote. “These companies can greatly influence democratic outcomes, yet they have not accountability to voters.” They added: “They are not even accountable to their own customers because nobody knows how theses companies curate content.” Cruz and Hawley are two of the biggest Republican critics of Google and Facebook, both of which are consistently accused of discriminating against conservative content. Hawley, for his part, introduced the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act in June that aims to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives online companies immunity only if they…
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by Kyle Perisic Google and Mastercard have reportedly struck a secret deal to monitor users’ in-store purchases, to collect data on what Google ads have resulted in purchases. After years of negotiations, Google paid Mastercard millions of dollars for its customer data, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing two anonymous sources. The two could be sharing ad revenue, Bloomberg added but also reported a Google spokeswoman denied that claim. “People don’t expect what they buy physically in a store to be linked to what they are buying online,” said advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Christine Bannan. “There’s just far too much burden that companies place on consumers and not enough responsibility being taken by companies to inform users what they’re doing and what rights they have.” Knowing which ads have resulted in purchases would make targeted ads — specialized ads tailored to specific individuals — much more valuable. Thus far, it has been almost impossible to tell if an online ad has resulted in a purchase. “Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information,” Google said in a statement, according to Bloomberg.…
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by Peter Hasson and Joe Simonson – Twitter’s recent algorithm change suppressed, or “shadow-banned,” prominent conservatives, including Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a new report found. – Gaetz is considering filing a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint against Twitter, he told The Daily Caller News Foundation. – Gaetz said his Twitter account’s growth slowed immediately after Twitter’s recent algorithm change. Twitter acknowledged the “inaccurate” search results but said it was unrelated to politics. Rep. Matt Gaetz is considering filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over Twitter’s alleged suppression of his account, the Florida Republican told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Wednesday. Gaetz was one of several prominent conservatives, including members of Congress and the chair of the Republican National Committee, whose accounts Twitter suppressed by making it harder to find in the site’s search function, a Vice News investigation published Wednesday found. “Democrats are not being ‘shadow banned’ in the same way,” the report concluded, noting: “Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.” Twitter announced in May that the company would rely on “behavior-based signals” to boost the visibility of some accounts and to suppress the visibility of others, as…
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by Eric Lieberman Cybersecurity and privacy experts are currently in the process of trying to rival Facebook by starting their own social media platform. With a fundraising page set to launch Tuesday, the “open source” social network called Openbook is aimed at “helping make the world a better place,” a similar overarching objective to that of Facebook. The professed difference is that Openbook will be “privacy-friendly” in which it won’t monitor or track users. “Surf the network with absolute peace of mind!” the start-up’s site says. Many avid users of social media, including the ones who find fault with Facebook and accuse it of not caring how user data is utilized, even manipulated, are often reluctant to try to find an alternative to Facebook because of its apparent ubiquitousness. They worry, in other words, that jumping ship to another platform is mostly pointless because not enough people will follow — seemingly not considering the fundamental principles behind a movement or protest. But Openbook, which was founded in The Hague, Netherlands in April 2018, appears to have a solution by allowing users to import all photos, videos, chat logs, and other content and communications, into its platform via a “drag-and-drop” feature. While there appears to be no direct mention of…
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by George Rasley Conservatives who have suffered discrimination from tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook will derive a little bit of pleasure from recent disclosures the company made in a small courtroom in Redwood City, California. According to reporting in the UK’s Guardian, Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of the news industry: it is a tech platform, not a publisher or a media company. But on Monday, the Guardian reports attorneys for the social media company presented a different message from the one executives have made to Congress, in interviews and in speeches: Facebook, they repeatedly argued, is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the First Amendment. As the Guardian pointed out, questions about Facebook’s moral and legal responsibilities as a publisher have escalated surrounding its role in spreading false news and propaganda, along with questionable censorship decisions. The plaintiff, as the Guardian explained, is a former startup called Six4Three, first filed the suit in 2015 after Facebook removed app developers’ access to friends’ data. The company had built a controversial and ultimately failed app called Pikinis, which allowed people to filter photos to find ones with people in bikinis and other swimwear. Six4Three attorneys have alleged that Facebook enticed developers to create apps for its platform by…
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The National Security Agency is deleting more than 685 million call records the government obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies in connection with investigations, raising questions about the viability of the program. The NSA’s bulk collection of call records was initially curtailed by Congress after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government surveillance. The law, enacted in June 2015, said that going forward, the data would be retained by telecommunications companies, not the NSA, but that the intelligence agency could query the massive database. Now the NSA is deleting all the information it collected from the queries. The agency released a statement late Thursday saying it started deleting the records in May after NSA analysts noted “technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunication service providers.” It also said the irregularities resulted in the NSA obtaining some call details it was not authorized to receive. That points to a failure of the program, according to David Kris, a former top national security official at the Justice Department. “They said they have to purge three years’ worth of data going back to 2015, and that the data they did collect during that time — which they are now…
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by Jeffery Rendall Strolling towards the capitol on one of our recent trips to Williamsburg, Virginia, a thought struck me as we neared the reconstructed building; so much went on inside those walls but the people in the street had nary a clue about what was happening at the time. Sure, there were three newspapers in town (in the late 18th century), but they were somewhat crude enterprises by today’s standards, receiving and reprinting tidbits of intelligence from townspeople, passers through, other newspapers and let’s face it – plain gossip and hearsay. Just steps away great men were debating and deciding everyone’s future yet few common folk understood what was taking place except for what the men – or the royal governor and his council – chose to divulge. Not even the town crier was much help in this regard. Fast forward to today when practically everything that’s “official” is a matter of public record. Granted the government and its agents still keep plenty of secrets – the fallout from the Mueller investigation certainly revealed it – but we know a lot more than the Virginians of the 1760’s and 70’s did. Heck, they were about to sever ties with the…
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by Eric Lieberman A professor was recently unable to promote a podcast on Facebook that delved into Russians’ perspective of President Donald Trump because it was deemed to fall under the tech company’s new rules against political advertising. Sean Guillory, a scholar with a doctoral degree from UCLA, is the digital scholarship curator at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian and East European Studies. In his podcast episode published Saturday called “Russians on Trump,” Guillory interviewed another expert Laurence Bogoslaw, who has established a collective resource for translated Russian news coverage of Trump. Knowing very well how hot of a topic the president, the foreign adversary and alleged connections between the two are, Guillory wanted to promote the dialogue. Facebook denied his request to purchase an ad slot for the podcast. Eventually, after an appeal, the tech giant explained that it regards Guillory’s interview as political content, meaning there would be greater scrutiny and a potentially higher cost for sponsorship. “This is the crux of the problem: What is ‘political’?” Guillory told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “I see my podcast as educational in that its mission is to interview people who have some expert knowledge about Eurasia’s politics, culture and…
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by Rachel del Guidice Conservative social media personalities Diamond and Silk, who say Facebook has censored their page, were front and center at a congressional hearing Thursday on the content-filtering practices of social media platforms. “Shame on the ones that don’t even see that we have been censored, yet when the Black Lives Matter people complain about it—oh, everybody is up in arms,” Lynnette “Diamond” Hardaway said Thursday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Hardaway appears regularly in videos on the social media site Diamond and Silk with her real-life sister, Rochelle “Silk” Richardson. “Let me just say this here: If the shoe was on the other foot, and Mark Zuckerberg was a conservative, and we were liberals—oh, fences and chains would have broke loose,” Hardaway said of the Facebook CEO. “You know it, and I know it.” [ The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more ] Twitter declined The Daily Signal’s request for comment, but Facebook said that it’s standing by remarks made by Zuckerberg, when he testified April 10 and 11 on Capitol Hill about the company’s practices. “As Mark stated during his testimony in front…
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