News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Election Interference: YouTube Censors
Jordan Peterson Interview of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

YouTube has taken down a video interview by Jordan Peterson of Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., prompting accusations that the Google-owned platform is once again seeking to manipulate national politics and interfere in a presidential election in the U.S.

The interview took place on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, and is over an hour and a half long. It can still be watched in full on Twitter, whose owner, Elon Musk, hosted the Democrat candidate for a Spaces interview earlier this month.
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“Now YouTube has taken upon itself to actively interfere with a presidential election campaign,” said Jordan Peterson after news of the censorship broke.

RFK Jr. also spoke out, calling for public pressure to address the platform’s actions.
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“Do you really need Big Tech censors to decide what you should hear? Or would you prefer to be treated as a competent adult who can listen to various viewpoints and come to his or her own conclusions?”
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“It may be that YouTube has broken no laws in this blatant interference in the electoral process,” continued RFK Jr. “In that case, change will come only through public pressure. That’s democracy in action!”

The Democrat candidate called on people who disagreed with the platform’s decision to upload videos to YouTube “telling them what you think.”

In a statement to the media, YouTube said it took down the Jordan Peterson interview because of “vaccine misinformation.”
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“Free speech is the fertilizer; it’s the sunlight; it’s the water for democracy,” [Kennedy] continued. “There is no time in history where the people who were censoring speech were the good guys.

Perhaps we should go back to 2019 to learn how YouTube actually works.

‘THE SMOKING GUN’: Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results
for Abortion, Maxine Waters, David Hogg

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress last month that his company does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result. Yet an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals Google regularly intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform – including a recent intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for “abortion.”

The term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries,” which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.

The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.

In the leaked discussion thread, a Google site reliability engineer hinted at the existence of more search blacklists, according to the source.

“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate,” said the employee. “Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial.”
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The software engineer noted that the change had occurred following an inquiry from a left-wing Slate journalist about the prominence of pro-life videos on YouTube, and that pro-life videos were replaced with pro-abortion videos in the top ten results for the search terms following Google’s manual intervention.

“The Slate writer said she had complained last Friday and then saw different search results before YouTube responded to her on Monday,” wrote the employee. “And lo and behold, the [changelog] was submitted on Friday, December 14 at 3:17 PM.”

The manually downranked items included several videos from Dr. Antony Levatino, a former abortion doctor who is now a pro-life activist. Another video in the top ten featured a woman’s personal story of being pressured to have an abortion, while another featured pro-life conservative Ben Shapiro. The Slate journalist who complained to Google reported that these videos previously featured in the top ten, describing them in her story as “dangerous misinformation.”

Russian Hacking Group Claims Execution of Reddit Attack
Threatens Leaking Censorship Data

Social media site Reddit reported a hacking incident for which the ALPHV Russian ransomware group has now claimed to be the perpetrator. The group threatens to leak censorship and other sensitive, stolen information in relation to Reddit if the company does not pay $4.5 million.

Reddit had reported the data breach on February after an employee fell victim to a phishing attack, giving passwords that allowed access to a part of the company’s files.

The ransomware group ALPHV, also known as BlackCat, claimed the attack on Saturday, BleepingComputer reported.

BlackCat claimed to have stolen 80 gigabytes (GB) of data from Reddit, including internal documents, source code, employee data, and advertiser data.
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“We show no indications of breach of our primary production systems (the parts of our stack that run Reddit and store the majority of our data).”

BlackCat has posted an article on its data leaking website and says it plans to leak the data if Reddit does not pay $4.5 million. The hacking group said it contacted Reddit in April and June, asking for the money.

“I told them in my first email that I would wait for their IPO to come along. But this seems like the perfect opportunity! We are very confident that Reddit will not pay any money for their data,” BlackCat’s post says.

“But I am very happy to know that the public will be able to read about all the statistics they track about their users and all the interesting confidential data we took. Did you know they also silently censor users? Along with artifacts from their GitHub!”

The hacking group also demanded the withdrawal of a pricing change Reddit recently did for third-party use of its website.
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BlackCat has also infiltrated the Australian law firm HWL Ebsworth, obtaining information from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), a client of the firm, according to a June 15 report.

One of the biggest business law companies in Australia, HWL Ebsworth, offers expert assistance to the OAIC.

This comes after AlphV stole four terabytes of corporate data, including personnel information, in April.

On June 8, the hacker collective was reported to have released more than 1.45 terabytes of sensitive data on the dark web. However, since HWL Ebsworth has a variety of governmental and business clients, it is unclear what information has been released.

Intel to Build $33-Billion Chip Plant in Germany
After Government Pledges to Cover 1/3rd of Cost

Intel and the German government signed a deal Monday that will see the U.S. company spend more than 30 billion euros ($32.8 billion) to build a chip manufacturing site in the eastern city of Magdeburg, after Germany pledged to cover a third of the investment required.

Word of the agreement came as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger in Berlin.

Intel acquired the land for two semiconductor facilities in Magdeburg in November. It says the first one is expected to start production in four or five years.
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Before the revised letter of intent was signed Monday plans had foreseen a total investment of at least 17 billion euros. The German government confirmed that it will now provide 9.9 billion euros toward the total.

The plan will need approval by the European Union’s executive branch to ensure the deal doesn’t give Intel an unfair advantage over its competitors.

The “Silicon Junction” project in Magdeburg adds to Intel’s plans for an assembly and test facility near Wroclaw, Poland, and an existing chip factory in Ireland.

In a speech to Germany’s main industry lobby group earlier Monday, Scholz highlighted efforts to encourage chip production in Europe, reducing his country’s dependence on imported chips and global supply chains.