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Oversight committee investigates alleged Google censorship of Trump shooting

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U.S. House Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., launched an investigation Wednesday into allegations that Google and Meta, formerly known as Facebook, censored or misrepresented content about President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Comer sent letters to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai Wednesday over the alleged censorship, which grabbed national attention after the near-fatal assassination attempt against Trump in Butler County, Pennsylvania July 13.

How Google and Facebook handled questions and searches about the assassination attempt against Trump sparked criticism.

“Specifically, Meta’s AI assistant claimed, ‘the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump was a ‘fictional’ event,’ even as the chatbot ‘had plenty to say about Democratic rival Kamala Harris’ run for the White House,” Comer wrote, citing a New York Post article. “When asked if the assassination on President Trump was fictional, Meta’s bot responded that there ‘was no real assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I strive to provide accurate and reliable information, but sometimes mistakes can occur.’ The bot further added, ‘[t]o confirm, there has been no credible report or evidence of a successful or attempted assassination of Donald Trump.’”

Facebook’s team also admitted that it censored the photo of a bloody Trump holding his fist in the air just after the shooting, a photo that went viral online and became a rallying point for his campaign.

“This was an error,” Facebook Communications Director Dani Levi wrote on X about the photo. “This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.”

“Google users report that autocompleted search prompts related to the assassination attempt of President Trump produced results for failed assassination attempts of former Presidents, including Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan—or even assassinations of historical figures such as Archduke Franz Ferdinand—but omitted from the list of automatically generated search suggestions the recent attempt on President Trump’s life,” Comer wrote.

Google told CBS MoneyWatch that the search issues were technical “anomalies” that were unintentional and could affect anyone.

Comer’s investigation is calling for documents and answers on how Google’s search and autocomplete works. Google staff briefed the committee earlier this month.

“In response to preliminary staff inquiries, Google contends that the Autocomplete results omitted the Trump assassination attempt due to a safety protocol concerning predicted assassination attempts of current political leaders, and Google had not yet updated the Autocomplete feature to reflect that an assassination attempt of President Trump had occurred,” Comer wrote.

In his letter to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, Comer pointed out that the executive branch regulates the tech companies that can have bias in determining who runs the executive branch.

“The Committee has long been concerned with how large technology companies leverage their businesses to influence public opinion—especially the design and use of content moderation policies within private sector social media companies—and how company policies are shaped and influenced by Executive Branch officials,” Comer wrote in his letter to Zuckerberg.

After the issues last month, Trump blasted both companies online, saying “here we go again” and calling it “rigging the election,” an apparent reference to how social media companies at the urging of the FBI censored news stories about the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation but the laptop later was found to be real.

D.C. Bureau Reporter

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Censorship Industrial Complex

G20’s Online Speech Clampdown Calls Set To Ignite Free Speech Fears

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G20 leaders convened in Rio de Janeiro have called for enhanced responsibility and transparency from digital platforms to tackle the growing challenges of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” and others on their long list of supposed online “harms.”

The summit’s final declaration highlighted the transformative role of digital platforms in global communication but noted the adverse effects of digital content’s rapid spread. It called for increased accountability from platforms to manage speech, which should raise eyebrows among free speech advocates who’ve heard all this before.

We obtained a copy of the declaration for you here.

During the summit, the leaders highlighted the transformative impact of digital platforms in communication and information dissemination across the globe. However, they also alleged negative ramifications of unchecked digital spaces, where “harmful” content can proliferate at an unprecedented pace and scale.

In response, the G20’s final declaration underscored the critical role of digital platforms in ensuring their ecosystems do not become breeding grounds for speech they don’t like.

The declaration states: “We recognize that digital platforms have reshaped the digital ecosystem and online interactions by amplifying information dissemination and facilitating communication within and across geographical boundaries. However, the digitization of the information realm and the accelerated evolution of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), has dramatically impacted the speed, scale, and reach of misinformation and disinformation, hate speech, and other forms of online harms.”

The G20 goes on to say that it emphasizes the “need for digital platforms’ transparency and responsibility in line with relevant policies and applicable legal frameworks and will work with platforms and relevant stakeholders in this regard.”

The declaration even says more measures need to be taken to control what it says is the spread of online misogyny and the need to combat it “online and offline.”

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Environment

Climate Scientists declare the climate “emergency” is at an end

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The Chamber of Deputies, Prague, Czechia

News release from the Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel)

Climate scientists have issued a shock declaration that the “climate emergency” is over.

A two-day climate conference in Prague, organized by the Czech division of the international Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel), which took place on November 12-13 in the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic in Prague, “declares and affirms that the imagined and imaginary ‘climate emergency’ is at an end”.

The communiqué, drafted by the eminent scientists and researchers who spoke at the conference, makes clear that for several decades climate scientists have  systematically exaggerated the influence of CO2 on global temperature.

The high-level scientific conference also declared:

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.”

The declaration supports the conclusions of the major Clintel report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC [presented to the Conference by Marcel Crok, Clintel’s co-founder].

Moreover, the scientists at the conference declared that even if all nations moved straight to net zero emissions, by the 2050 target date the world would be only about 0.1 C cooler than with no emissions reduction.

So far, the attempts to mitigate climate change by international agreements such as the Paris Agreement have made no difference to our influence on climate, since nations such as Russia and China, India and Pakistan continue greatly to expand their combustion of coal, oil and gas.

The cost of achieving that 0.1 C reduction in global warming would be $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ worldwide gross domestic product.

Finally, the conference “calls upon the entire scientific community to cease and desist from its persecution of scientists and researchers who disagree with the current official narrative on climate change and instead to encourage once again the long and noble tradition of free, open and uncensored scientific research, investigation, publication and discussion”.

The full text of the communiqué follows:

The International Scientific Conference of the Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel), in the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic in Prague assembled on the Twelfth and Thirteenth Days of November 2024, has resolved and now declares as follows, that is to say –

  1. The modest increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that has taken place since the end of the Little Ice Age has been net-beneficial to humanity.
  2. Foreseeable future increases in greenhouse gases in the air will probably also prove net-beneficial.
  3. The rate and amplitude of global warming have been and will continue to be appreciably less than climate scientists have long predicted.
  4. The Sun, and not greenhouse gases, has contributed and will continue to contribute the overwhelming majority of global temperature.
  5. Geological evidence compellingly suggests that the rate and amplitude of global warming during the industrial era are neither unprecedented nor unusual.
  6. Climate models are inherently incapable of telling us anything about how much global warming there will be or about whether or to what extent the warming has a natural or anthropogenic cause.
  7. Global warming will likely continue to be slow, small, harmless and net-beneficial.
  8. There is broad agreement among the scientific community that extreme weather events have not increased in frequency, intensity or duration and are in future unlikely to do so.
  9. Though global population has increased fourfold over the past century, annually averaged deaths attributable to any climate-related or weather-related event have declined by 99%.
  10. Global climate-related financial losses, expressed as a percentage of global annual gross domestic product, have declined and continue to decline notwithstanding the increase in built infrastructure in harm’s way.
  11. Despite trillions of dollars spent chiefly in Western countries on emissions abatement, global temperature has continued to rise since 1990.
  12. Even if all nations, rather than chiefly western nations, were to move directly and together from the current trajectory to net zero emissions by the official target year of 2050, the global warming prevented by that year would be no more than 0.05 to 0.1 Celsius.
  13. If the Czech Republic, the host of this conference, were to move directly to net zero emissions by 2050, it would prevent only 1/4000 of a degree of warming by that target date.
  14. Based pro rata on the estimate by the UK national grid authority that preparing the grid for net zero would cost $3.8 trillion (the only such estimate that is properly-costed), and on the fact that the grid accounts for 25% of UK emissions, and that UK emissions account for 0.8% of global emissions, the global cost of attaining net zero would approach $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ global annual GDP.
  15. On any grid where the installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar power exceeds the mean demand on that grid, adding any further wind or solar power will barely reduce grid CO2 emissions but will greatly increase the cost of electricity and yet will reduce the revenues earned by both new and existing wind and solar generators.
  16. The resources of techno-metals required to achieve global net zero emissions are entirely insufficient even for one 15-year generation of net zero infrastructure, so that net zero is in practice unattainable.
  17. Since wind and solar power are costly, intermittent and more environmentally destructive per TWh generated than any other energy source, governments should cease to subsidize or to prioritize them, and should instead expand coal, gas and, above, all nuclear generation.
  18. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.

Therefore, this conference hereby declares and affirms that the imagined and imaginary “climate emergency” is at an end.

This conference calls upon the entire scientific community to cease and desist from its persecution of scientists and researchers who disagree with the current official narrative on climate change and instead to encourage once again the long and noble tradition of free, open and uncensored scientific research, investigation, publication and discussion.

Given under our signs manual this Thirteenth Day of November in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Four.

Pavel Kalenda, Czech Republic [Conference Chairman]

Guus Berkhout, The Netherlands [Co-founder, Clintel]

Marcel Crok, The Netherlands [Co-founder, Clintel]

Lord Monckton, United Kingdom

Valentina Zharkova, United Kingdom

Milan Šálek, Czech Republic

Václav Procházka, Czech Republic

Gregory Wrightstone, United States (see below)

Jan Pokorný, Czech Republic

Szarka László, Hungary

James Croll, United Kingdom

Tomas Furst, Czech Republic

Gerald Ratzer, Canada

Douglas Pollock, Chile

Henri Masson, Belgium

Miroslav Žáček, Czech Republic

Jan-Erik Solheim, Norway

Video below from interview with Gregory Wrightstone.

Better to turn around halfway, than to get lost completely

Not climate change but climate policy is the main threat for the prosperity of western societies at this moment. The Clintel Foundation has stated, with a global network of 2000 scientists and experts, that there is no climate emergency. Western leaders, however, have all voted in favour of Net Zero targets for 2050, which will have a disastrous effect on our economy and therefore our prosperity. Meanwhile, the UN is increasing its effort to fight ‘disinformation’, which in practice means less open debate and more censoring of alternative views.

Climate policies are a threat for entrepreneurs and it enters deeper and deeper into the private life of citizens. Wind turbines of close to 300 meters in height industrialise our countrysides, harming the environment,, biodiversity and public health. House owners are forced to replace their gas heaters by costly heat pumps, leading to rising energy bills. More and more cities reduce speed limits to 30 kms per hour.

There is no support base among the population for all these costly measures but our political leaders so far ignore these objections. Sooner or later the tide will turn, because these policies are unfeasible and unaffordable. Clintel wants to speed up this process by making both citizens and political leaders aware of all the pitfalls. Clintel receives no funding from the government nor from the Postcode Lottery or the industry. We therefore ask citizens and small businesses to support us in our mission.

Your support will be used to:

* Explain in all details there is no climate emergency. No one should be afraid of climate change. We use our websites and social media channels to spread this information and also give interviews in the media.

* Analyse and criticize IPCC reports. We check them for alarmism and one-sidedness. In 2023 we published the book The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC.  We confront the IPCC with our results and will force them to respond to our criticism.

* Raise awareness for the negative side-effects of the current climate policies, both in terms of cost and impact on humans and the environment.

* Intervene in high profile climate court cases such as the one between Friends of the Earth and Shell in The Netherlands. Climate policy should be discussed in Parliaments, not in the courts.

If you share our views, please consider to support us through a (monthly) donation or by becoming Friend of Clintel.

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