Hezbollah Warns Trump And His MAGAts

BEIRUT (AP) — The leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said Sunday that Iran's missile attacks on two bases in Iraq housing U.S. forces was only the start of the retaliation for America's killing a top Iranian general in a drone strike.

Hassan Nasrallah described Iran's ballistic missile response as a “slap” to Washington, one that sent a message. The limited strikes caused no casualties and appeared to be mainly a show of force.

The leader of Hezbollah, which is closely aligned with Iran, said the strikes were the "first step down a long path" that will ensure U.S. troops withdraw from the region.

"The Americans must remove their bases, soldiers and officers and ships from our region. The alternative ... to leaving vertically is leaving horizontally. This is a decisive and firm decision," Nasrallah said.

“We are speaking about the start of a phase, about a new battle, about a new era in the region," he added.

His 90-minute televised speech marked one week since the killing of Iran's Gen. Qassim Soleimani.

Nasrallah praised Soleimani for his steadfast support for Hezbollah. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has provided training for Hezbollah, which fought in the war in Syria alongside Iran-backed militias that Soleimani directed.

Nasrallah said that the world is a different place after Soleimani's death, and not a safer place as some U.S. officials have declared.

Iran had for days been promising to respond forcefully to Soleimani's killing. But after the ballistic missile strikes, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that the country had “concluded proportionate measures in self-defense."

Nasrallah also praised the Iran's leadership for admitting to accidentally shooting down a Ukranian passenger plane on the night it launched the missile attacks. He called the acknowledgement “transparency that is unparalleled in the world.”

The plane crash early Wednesday killed all 176 people on board, mostly Iranians and Iranian-Canadians. Iran had initially pointed to a technical failure and insisted the armed forces were not to blame.

Hezbollah is one of Iran's main allies in the region and is a sworn enemy of Israel, with which it has had a series of confrontations, lastly in 2006.

Op Ed: Dear Hezbollah, 

All decent Americans hate Trump and his lies and crimes. Please don't harm any good Americans. If you kill bad Americans good American won't be upset about it. 

See more HERE!

Twitter Refuses to Be Transparent

Is Twitter Really Censoring Free Speech?

Kalev LeetaruContributor 

AI & Big Data

I write about the broad intersection of data and society.

The Twitter logo. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

The past month has seen a flurry of high profile announcements chronicling just how all-powerful social media companies have become in their control over what we see online. From Twitter’s nonchalant reminder of its ability to ban world leaders and their posts, to Facebook’s actual deletion of a head of state, Silicon Valley has been on the move to remind the world that it and it alone decides what we are permitted to see in its walled gardens that define our modern web. As we take stock of a new year, what does 2017 teach us about what to expect in the coming year?

The power of social media companies to determine what crosses their digital borders has been in the headlines this week with two major stories: Facebook’s redesigned News Feed that deemphasizes commercial and news content in favor of friends and family and a set of undercover videos by Project Veritas that claim to show several Twitter employees openly discussing how the platform limits or deletes posts or entire user accounts.

Project Veritas is known for selectively editing its videos and the manner in which the most recent videos were filmed and edited makes it difficult to fully assess their contents and the veracity of the claims they appear to make. The broader question, however, is why such films received the attention they did in 2018. The short answer is that they address a topic that the social media platforms themselves have been immensely reluctant to discuss publicly: how they make the myriad decisions each day of who and what to delete or restrict on their platforms.

When asked for comment on several specific claims made in the videos, a Twitter spokesperson issued a statement saying “The individuals depicted in this video were speaking in a personal capacity and do not represent or speak for Twitter” and that “Twitter is committed to enforcing our rules without bias and empowering every voice on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules.”  However, when asked about the specific claims made in the video regarding content moderation, Twitter would provide comment only regarding “shadowbanning,” saying “Twitter does not shadowban accounts. We do take actions to downrank accounts that are abusive, and mark them accordingly so people can still to click through and see these Tweets if they so choose” and referred to its Help Center regarding “Limiting Tweet visibility."

When asked whether the company unilaterally denied the allegations of “unwritten rules” and political bias in its content review teams that determine what content is considered a violation of its rules, the company responded to several other questions, but did not issue a denial or any other comment regarding the bias statements beyond denying the existence of “shadowbanning,” nor provide further comment regarding the question of bias or reviewer composition. Unfortunately, this appears to be the standard practice today of Silicon Valley companies when confronted with questions of how they decide what is permissible speech online: simply remain silent and wait for the story to pass, rather than take the opportunity to provide their users with more detail about how the online world they call home works. 

In particular, when confronted with questions of bias, whether relating to political affiliation in the US or government pressure internationally, companies have remained largely silent, refusing to provide any significant detail as to their moderation policies. Why is it that in 2018 the platforms we use to communicate with each other operate as opaque black boxes into which we have absolutely no insight or voice and simply accept that a handful of people in Silicon Valley will decide what a third of the earth’s population have the right to talk about?

When asked whether Twitter would consider releasing its full set of guides, manuals, documentation, tutorials, training materials and all other materials given to its reviewers or a justification for why it believes this material cannot be released, the company did not respond. In the past companies have claimed that releasing such material would enable bad actors to know just what they can get away with, but such arguments hold little merit in that every day bad actors post material looking to see just how close to the line they can tread without consequence.

Setting aside the specifics of its training manuals, it is also noteworthy that the companies have similarly steadfastly refused to provide aggregate demographics regarding their content review staff. Releasing basic top-level statistics as to gender, race, languages spoken, countries they hail from, self-identified political, social, religious and other affiliations and other demographics would go a long way towards refuting the bias claims that regularly surface regarding the companies’ review staff.

Understanding the composition of the review staff used by major social media platforms would help shed light on the languages and cultures that might be underrepresented and the kinds of hidden biases that can lurk unnoticed. After all, as I showed in 2016, Facebook’s News Feed was indeed extraordinarily biased, but in a way that others weren’t talking about: geographically.

Twitter also declined to respond when asked whether the company would be open to convening an external panel of academics and other experts from outside the company, providing them a large dataset of tweets and accounts it has limited, deleted or otherwise taken action on, and allowing them to produce a summary report for public distribution that would assess Twitter's accuracy and biases. In the end, even if the company felt that releasing any information regarding the aggregate demographics of its reviewers or any detail of its review process would harm its operational security, it is unclear why the company will not commit to allowing an independent external panel to assess its work. After all, if a blue ribbon panel of top scholars and data scientists from across the world were granted unrestricted access to its review materials and the actual records of what it has and has not taken action on to analyze them, it would go a long ways towards either confirming or finally refuting once and for all the myriad questions of bias that naturally occur when companies operate in strict secrecy.

Even simple questions like the percent of Twitter's accounts that are bots and how much of its content is automatically generated are complete unknowns. External groups routinely provide their own assessments, but beyond vague statements, the company has to date declined to provide firm hard numbers on just how much of its content and viewership is made of carbon rather than silicon. When asked whether the company would permit external auditing of its numbers, a spokesperson said they had nothing to add beyond the company’s previous statements.

Twitter’s opaque moderation policies also make it more difficult for the company to fight “fake news” and misinformation campaigns that leverage the anonymity of their platform. Parody accounts look and act very similar to the real accounts they satirize, but if they look too close to the real thing and aren’t clear enough about their satirical role, it can be difficult for users to tell the difference. For example, in the leadup to last year’s election, the Russian government is believed to have operated a troll account designed to look like the Tennessee State GOP. The Twitter account used the State Seal as its logo, “@TEN_GOP” as its handle and “Tennessee GOP” as its title, with its bio saying “I love God, I Love my Country.” Only later did it change its bio to “Unofficial Twitter of Tennessee Republications,” which could still easily leave unsuspecting users thinking it was operated in some fashion by or with the knowledge of the state GOP.

Despite 11 months of the real Tennessee GOP formally complaining to Twitter about the impersonating account, the company took no action, removing the account only after the company faced substantial scrutiny for the role its platform played in Russian influence campaigns. When asked for comment a spokesperson referred to its impersonation policy, which requires that such accounts “clearly stat[e] it is not affiliated with or connected to any similarly-named individuals.” In this case, the @TEN_GOP account did not include such language and in fact could easily have been confused for the real account, but Twitter did not respond to a further request for comment, including the use of the Tennessee State Seal as the account’s avatar.

This of course played out again last year with the rise of the “rogue” US Government agency accounts, from NASA to the National Park Service. As the accounts began attacking each other and even launching fundraisers, there was little for the average person to be able to know just which accounts, if any, were actually run by current or former US Government employees from the agencies they claimed to support.

Moreover, this lack of transparency can have very real consequences. When the official Twitter account of the President of the United States was briefly deactivated last fall, Twitter released precious little detail about how a single contractor could allegedly shut down the Twitter account of a head of state. In response, a Twitter spokesperson offered by email only “We won't have a comment on a former employee. We have taken a number of steps to keep an incident like this from happening again. In order to protect our internal security measures we don't have further details to share at this time.” Yet, once again we are left in the dark as to how much has really changed.

It is a remarkable turn of events that the company that once congratulated itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party and famously informed Congress it would not stop alleged terrorists from leveraging its services has evolved to slowly and steadily distance itself from its free speech ethos. With each update of its terms of service, the company has moved a bit further towards prioritizing commercial reality over the anything-goes mentality upon which it was founded.

However, the ideal of unfettered free speech still factors prominently into the company’s public ethos. In an interview last year, the company’s Head of Global Public Policy Communications offered “I am passionate about protecting and empowering all people to freely express themselves, even when that can lead to challenging conversations, because ultimately it is only through connecting with others that we can learn, grow, and evolve. Twitter has revolutionized the way people communicate and learn from one another, and I am proud to represent a company that both has such a strong commitment to free speech and approaches this issue with such care and thoughtfulness.”

Putting this all together, is Twitter actively censoring certain political views or are Project Veritas’ videos the result of selective editing and employee bravado? We will simply never know. Yet, the fact that we will never know is the problem. Whether it is claims of conservatives being censored on Twitter, allegations of government influence on Facebook, or very real geographic biases, the platforms we communicate through are no longer neutral. Here in the United States, your cellular provider doesn’t actively monitor your phone calls and mute out the topics they don’t like. The USPS doesn’t inspect every letter for adverse political views. Your ISP doesn’t block access to sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square. In other countries such censorship is a routine and accepted part of daily life, but here in the US we have grown accustomed to neutral communications mediums that connect us to others without actively moderating what we are permitted to say. In their place, the online world that was supposed to bring us together and tear down the last bastions of censorship has instead created the greatest censorship and surveillance infrastructure the world could ever imagine.

Treasonous President Donald Trump Concocted a Blatant and Dangerous Lie

President Donald Trump concocted a blatant lie in a tweet Saturday morning, accusing Democrats of “defending the life of Qassem Soleimani” who he called “one of the worst terrorists in history.”

There is no evidence that any Democrats have made such a defense. After Trump ally and suspected Republican pedophile Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) made a similar assertion earlier this week, he apologized soon thereafter.

Russians Think Soleimani Was Great, and Trump’s a Big Loser

Writing on Twitter, the president asked, “Where have the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats gone when they have spent the last 3 days defending the life of Qassem Soleimani,” adding, “He was also looking to do big future damage! ‘Dems are “unhinged.’”

Earlier in the week, Nikki Haley, Trump’s former Ambassador to the United Nations, claimed on Fox News that Democrats were “mourning” the loss of the Iranian general. When pressed on what she meant, she doubled down.

“Mourning comes in different forms,” Haley’s office said in a statement. “It doesn’t have to be literally crying over the casket like Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei. Leading Democrats are aggressively arguing that we would be better off if Qassem Suleimani was still alive today. That is effectively mourning his death.”

Democratic presidential candidates have been explicit about Soleimani’s legacy. “No Americans will mourn Qassem Soleimani’s passing,” Democratic presidential hopeful and former Vice President Joe Biden said. “He deserved to be brought to justice.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also called the Iranian general “a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans” even as she questioned the strategic reasoning behind the timing of the strike that took him out.

The mistruth aka filthy fucking lie follows a barrage of other eyebrow-raising claims by the president. On Friday, he claimed that four embassies were under threat from Iran. But, as the Washington Post reported, “that was at odds with intelligence assessments from senior officials.”

The Trump administration has been under increasing pressure to supply concrete evidence about the “imminent threat” that led them to take out Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Instagram Enabling Sexual Predators While Punishing Victims

Corporate Trash At Instagram Enabling Sexual Predators While Banning Victims

My OpEd: What does this have to do with treasonous criminal Donald Trump? You may may be asking. As you may or may not know, society, the criminal justice system, and corporate run social media has rules for us peasants while members of the ruling class are exempt from all rules including the rule of law. As most people know, Trump, scumbag that he is, violates rules on Twitter with every lie filled tweet yet Twitter allows him to post lie after lie after lie. There was a time when this sort of fuckery wouldn't be happening because somebody would show up at 181 South Park Street Suite 2 San Francisco, CA 94107 United States, San Francisco, CA Instagram head quarters and beat the shit out of the gangsters responsible or vandalize their BMWs or pie them in the face with a shit pies for this sort of fuckery. Instagram Customer Service Support Phone No – 1-415-857-3369.

Social media corporations are disgraceful. They censor anonymously. They offer no appeals process. They sic their own trolls onto targets. They take money from Russian trolls. If this sort of treachery existed during the time of the French Revolution Robespierre would have executed every last one of them. Billionaire Kevin Systrom the piece of shit billionaire CEO running Instagram.

She Reported Her Sexual Harasser To Instagram. It Banned Her Instead.

After calling out a harasser on her Instagram page, Venus Libido was told she was the one who'd violated the platform's rules. (Photo: Courtesy of Venus Libido)

British influencer and illustrator Venus Libido was at home in Southampton recovering from a recent surgery when the notifications popped up on her phone. In private messages to her 128,000-follower Instagram account, a stranger had sent her two photos of his penis, along with the text “enjoy the view.”

It was the afternoon of Dec. 16 and Venus, who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity, closed the app in disgust. If she ignored him, she figured, he would probably go away. But moments later, another message appeared: “bitch i know you read it say something.”

As an outspoken feminist and mental health advocate, Venus decided to post screenshots of the man’s messages on her Instagram Story and page (censoring his genitals and username) to call attention to the kind of harassment women endure daily on the platform. She also blocked and reported him to Instagram. It wasn’t long before he contacted her from two newly created accounts to threaten and verbally abuse her.

“WTF take that down bict [sic],” he wrote. “My fucking girl could see this … your done!!”

So Venus reported him again. A short time later, Instagram — which rolled out a new anti-bullying initiative that same day — told her the man had not violated its user guidelines, and his account would remain intact. In fact, it was Venus who’d broken the rules, according to the next alert she received. Instagram removed her post without specifying which policy it had violated, an action the company would later claim was taken in error.

“That really angered me,” Venus recalled. She then posted a piece of her artwork on her page with a caption describing the situation and criticizing Instagram for declining to take action against her harasser. Minutes later, as comments were flooding in from other people describing their similar experiences on the app, Instagram shut down her account altogether. My OpEd: The scumbag who sent her the dick picture was probably Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom. The reason I say this is because Systrom knows this what happened and he could have her account restored in minutes and have the guy who sent her the dick pictures found and arrested.

After Venus called out Instagram for punishing her instead of her abuser, Instagram deleted her account. (Photo: Instagram/VenusLibido)

Social media sites are shielded from liability for user-generated content, meaning they’re free to decide who and what is allowed on their platforms. By choosing to silence victims and protect abusers, Instagram is not only tolerating harassment — it’s encouraging it. 

Venus’ case isn’t an isolated occurrence. In July, when accusations of sexual misconduct started to pour in against disgraced celebrity photographers Marcus Hyde and Timur Emek, a number of models used Instagram to speak out about their own alleged experiences with the two men.

Instagram reportedly disabled the account belonging to photographer and art director Haley Bowman after she used it to accuse Emek of assaulting her when she was a teenager. Upon regaining access to her page, Bowman said she felt as if she was “being punished for calling out a rapist,” according to Screen Shot Magazine.

Similarly, after model Sunnaya Nash posted screenshots purporting to show Hyde asking her for nude photos of herself in exchange for a free photo shoot, Instagram took down the posts and threatened to delete Nash’s account. 

Instagram, which eventually removed Hyde and Emek’s accounts as the allegations continued to surface, later claimed that the deletion of Nash’s content “was a mistake obviously.”

Venus received a similar explanation from the company, but she doesn’t buy it.

“I felt like I was being silenced for calling out an issue Instagram wasn’t addressing,” she said of her own account’s closure. “I’ve built my account up over two years, and it felt like it was being ripped away from me for speaking out.”

Like many content creators, Venus uses Instagram as a digital portfolio where she promotes her work to a wide audience. Being kicked off the billion-user site threatened to jeopardize her livelihood, so she appealed the deletion through the app and contacted an Instagram representative directly.

After several anxious hours, Venus’ account was reinstated. Not long after she’d logged back in the next morning — her 28th birthday — her harasser sent her yet another photo of his penis with the message: “I hope that teached you a lesson getting your account removed!!”

Venus' harasser has sent her unsolicited photos of his genitals from multiple Instagram accounts. This image was blurred by HuffPost. (Photo: Courtesy of Venus Libido)

Venus blocked the man yet again, but that didn’t stop him from creating one new account after another to continue his campaign of abuse. Later in the day, he sent her a full-body nude and another stream of messages:

“ur boring”

“oh and a dumb slut” 

“if i gave u my real instagram would you not expose me and just write me a message?”

After being contacted by HuffPost, a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said that it has taken action to ban the man from its platform, and that it had mistakenly removed Venus’ content and account.

“@venuslibido didn’t violate our policies and we apologize for the mistakes we made when reviewing content on her account,” the spokesperson said. “We have taken steps to stop the individual harassing @venuslibido from returning to Instagram.”

Venus sees a pattern. Instagram is notorious for censoring, shadow banning and silencing women, she noted. And although the company claims her original post was removed in error, it still hasn’t been restored.

“How is it that Instagram cracks down so hard on things like female nipples, but they’ll continue to let a man send me photos of his genitals even after I’ve reported him over and over again?” Venus asked, referring to Instagram’s ban on posts that show women’s nipples.

Since the scare of having her account deleted, several people have suggested that Venus keep her head down and stay quiet to reduce the risk of being deplatformed again, she said. But she refuses to self-censor.

“I have a chance to use my voice and my platform for good,” she said. “I don’t care if I get removed again. I’ll just keep fighting it because this is wrong, and if I don’t say something, then what am I doing?”

Related...

Instagram’s Shadow Ban On Vaguely ‘Inappropriate’ Content Is Plainly Sexist

The New Feminist Trend That’s Breeding Mob Misogyny

How Instagram Became A Hotspot For Vile Conspiracies And 2020 Disinformation

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

By Supporting Trump Evangelicals Have Assured Themselves a Place in Hell

As the political clamor caused by a top Christian magazine’s call to remove President Donald Trump from office continues to reverberate, more than 100 conservative evangelicals closed ranks further around Trump on Sunday.

In a letter to the president of Christianity Today magazine, the group of evangelicals chided Editor-in-Chief Mark Galli for penning an anti-Trump editorial, published Thursday, that they portrayed as a dig at their characters as well as the president’s in spite of the fact the editorial was truthful

“Your editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations,” the evangelicals wrote to the magazine’s president, Timothy Dalrymple.

The new offensive from the group of prominent evangelicals aka fake Christians, including multiple members of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, signals a lingering awareness by the president’s backers that any meaningful crack in his longtime support from that segment of the Christian community could prove perilous for his reelection hopes. Though no groundswell of new anti-Trump sentiment emerged among evangelicals in the wake of Christianity Today’s editorial, the depraved president fired off scathing tweets Friday accusing the establishment magazine – founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham in 1956 -- of becoming a captive of the left.

The letter to the magazine’s president sent on Sunday also included a veiled threat that Christianity Today could lose readership or advertising revenue as a result of the editorial, which cites Trump’s impeachment last week.

Citing Galli’s past characterization of himself as an “elite” evangelical, the letter’s authors told Dalrymple that “it’s up to your publication to decide whether or not your magazine intends to be a voice of evangelicals like those represented by the signatories below, and it is up to us and those Evangelicals like us to decide if we should subscribe to, advertise in and read your publication online and in print, but historically, we have been your readers.”

Among the signatories of the letter are pedophile George Wood, chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship; con artist Rev. Tim Hill of the Church of God; former Arkansas governor and pedophile enabler GOP presidential hopeful Lyin Mike Huckabee; and former Minnesota GOP Rep. Crazy Michele Bachmann.

Galli told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he views the chances of Trump leaving office, either through a reelection loss or post-impeachment conviction by the Senate, as “probably fairly slim at this point.” The editor-in-chief defended his editorial as less of a “political judgment” than a call for fellow evangelicals to examine their tolerance of Trump’s “moral character” in exchange for his embrace of conservative policies high on their agenda.

“We're not looking for saints. We do have private sins, ongoing patterns of behavior that reveal themselves in our private life that we're all trying to work on,” Galli said Sunday. “But a president has certain responsibilities as a public figure to display a certain level of public character and public morality.”

Galli referred comment on Sunday’s evangelical letter to Dalrymple, who on Sunday published his own strongly worded defense of the magazine's anti-Trump commentary.

Countering Trump's suggestion that the magazine had shifted to favor liberals, Dalrymple wrote that the publication is in fact “theologically conservative” and “does not endorse candidates.”

“Out of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship or intellectual elitism, this is why we feel compelled to say that the alliance of American evangelicalism with this presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness,” Dalrymple wrote.

Asked about the editorial’s indictment of Trump by “Fox News Sunday,” Marc Short – chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, himself a prominent evangelical Christian – cited some of the policy positions that have helped endear the president to many in that voting bloc.

“For a lot of us who are celebrating the birth of our Savior this week, the way that we look at it is that this president has helped to save thousands of similar unplanned pregnancies,” Short said Sunday, adding that “no president has been a greater ally to Israel than this president.”

Roughly 8 in 10 white evangelical Protestants say they approve of the way Trump is handling his job, according to a December poll from The AP-NORC Center.

The Trump campaign is planning a Jan. 3 event in Miami called “Evangelicals for Trump."

The Fake War On Christmas and Youtube Fuckery

The slime that invented the bullshit war on Christmas all deserve long ad painful deaths. In the above video the creator explains how the trash that runs youtube is fucking with them and other channels. Below is a song that mocks the fake Christian and their war on Christmas crap. To all you Trump MAGAts; may each and everyone of you die and burn in hell.

Another Example of the American Police State