Former lobbyist/political advisor Joel Kaplan joined Facebook in 2011 to lead its Washington D.C. outreach, reports BuzzFeed news. But some employees said they were very unhappy with decisions made by both Kaplan and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then…
Tag: insurrection
They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them
In 2019 two New York Times opinion writers obtained cellphone app data “containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017.” (It’s data that they say is “supposed to be anonymous, but it isn’t. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans.”) Now they’ve obtained a remarkable new trove of data, “this…
New Site Extracts and Posts Every Face from Parler’s Capitol Hill Insurrection Videos
“Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared,” reports WIRED, saying the site raises clear privacy concerns: The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple,…
Online Far-Right Movements Fracture, as ‘Gullible’ QAnon Supporters Criticized
“Online far-right movements are splintering,” argues NBC News: Users on forums that openly helped coordinate the Jan. 6 riot and called for insurrection…have become increasingly agitated with QAnon supporters, who are largely still in denial that President Donald Trump will no longer be in the Oval Office after Jan. 20… [QAnon adherents] have identified Inauguration Day as a last stand, and…
House Votes To Impeach President Trump a Historic Second Time
A House majority, including several Republicans, on Wednesday voted to impeach President Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” The New York Times reports: The House had enough votes on Wednesday to impeach President Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the United States government, as more than a half-dozen members of the president’s party joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes…
Parler Users Breached Deep Inside US Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: At least several users of the far-right social network Parler appear to be among the horde of rioters that managed to penetrate deep inside the U.S. Capitol building and into areas normally restricted to the public, according to GPS metadata linked to videos posted to the platform the day of the insurrection in…
Scraped Parler Data Is a Metadata Gold Mine
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Embattled social media platform Parler is offline after Apple, Google and Amazon pulled the plug on the site after the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol last week that left five people dead. But while the site is gone (for now), millions of posts published to the site since the riot are not….
Discord Bans Pro-Trump Server From Its Platform
Mashable reports:
We’re all judged by the company we keep. With that adage seemingly in mind, Discord moved Friday to ban a pro-Donald Trump server from its platform. TheDonald, as the server was titled, allowed likeminded individuals to digitally gather and was directly linked to the recently banned r/DonaldTrump subreddit and a separate discussion forum… “While there is no evidence of that…
How Will America’s Investigators Identify Capitol Hill Protesters?
“Both local police and the FBI are seeking information about individuals who were ‘actively instigating violence’ in Washington, DC, on January 6,” writes Ars Technica. Then they speculate on which tools will be used to find them:
While media organizations took thousands of photos police can use, they also have more advanced technologies at their disposal to identify participants, following what several…