A Journal of People report
Reports regularly expose the mainstream media (MSM) Following are two reports:
Israeli military contract. Google employees protest.
Google employees protesting the company’s Project Nimbus contract with Amazon Web Services and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gone public with a week of protest actions set to culminate in a multi-city demonstration headlined No Tech for Apartheid.
A multiethnic, multireligious group of Googlers calling themselves Jewish Diaspora in Tech hopes to pressure the tech giant into dropping the mammoth $1.2 billion contract on moral grounds, arguing that by allowing Israel access to its most sophisticated machine learning and AI technology, Google is enabling heinous crimes against the occupied Palestinian population.
Google marketing manager and leading anti-Nimbus advocate Ariel Koren announced her resignation on Tuesday after what she described as a pattern of hostility and retaliation from management.
After seven years with the company, Koren said she was presented with an ultimatum – move from San Francisco to Google’s Brazil office or quit – over her efforts lobbying against the project.
“Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and stripping away the voices of its employees through a pattern of silencing a retaliation towards me and many others,” Koren wrote in her resignation letter published on Medium. The secretive effort to provide an “all-encompassing cloud solution” powered by the company’s most advanced technology has seen Google abandon its prized transparency so much that employees have no idea what the tech they’re selling the IDF will really be used for.
Koren and her colleagues are merely seeking basic transparency regarding what their labor will be used to do, she told Peacock TV, explaining that under the current regime, “we don’t understand the extent to which [our work] is going to be used to perpetrate systemic human rights violations by an by an agency and by a military that we know violates human rights in an extremely egregious and atrocious way every single day.”
Worse, the Nimbus contract explicitly bars Google or Amazon from exerting control over how their services are used by the IDF.
Since the launch of Project Nimbus, Google has become an aggressively anti-Palestinian place to work, according to 15 employees whose recorded testimonials were released to coincide with Koren’s resignation. Google employees can no longer even “express any opinion of disagreement of the war waged on Palestinians without being called into an HR meeting with the threat of retaliation,” one Palestinian Googler said, while another was told using the phrase “support Palestine” was offensive.
“I feel like I am making a living off the oppression of my family back home,” a third anonymous employee lamented.
They also charge that Project Nimbus violates Google’s vaunted AI code of ethics, which prohibits the company from using AI to cause harm, develop weapons, or conduct surveillance in violation of international norms. The code was devised after employee activism scuttled Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative that would have used Google’s AI to analyze drone surveillance footage for the purpose of improving targeting.
While Google declined to comment regarding specifics of Project Nimbus, a spokeswoman dismissed Koren’s claims regarding retaliation by management, explaining they had been “thoroughly investigated” and found baseless.
Facebook censored Hunter Biden story after FBI warning: Zuckerberg says
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said his platform worked to limit the reach of an explosive story about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, after federal law enforcement told him to be “vigilant” about foreign misinformation.
Zuckerberg spoke at length about the controversy during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Thursday, defending Facebook’s response to a New York Post report published ahead of the 2020 election which alleged a series of shady business dealings by Hunter Biden, citing documents obtained from one of his laptops.
While the CEO noted that Facebook “took a different path than Twitter” – which outright banned the story and even prevented users from sharing it in direct messages – he said his team ultimately decided to limit the spread of the article based on advice he had received from the FBI.
“The background here is the FBI basically came to us and was like ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election; we have it on notice that basically there is about to be some kind of dump that is similar to that. So be vigilant,” he said, paraphrasing the words of a federal agent.
He said: “We just kind of thought, if the FBI – which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it is very professional law enforcement – if they come to us and tell us we need to be on guard about something then I want to take that seriously.
However, when Rogan asked whether the FBI had specifically mentioned the New York Post story in question, Zuckerberg said he could not recall, but added “it basically fir the pattern” outlined by the agency.
He also did not specify when he was in contact with the bureau, or whether the discussions came before or after dozens of former intelligence officials issued a letter alleging that the Hunter Biden story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The ex-officials cited no evidence to support the assertion, but nonetheless declared they were “deeply suspicious” about the embarrassing report.
While a number of media outlets were initially dismissive of the laptop story – with NPR even deeming it a waste of time and insisting it would not cover it – major publications have since reversed course and acknowledged that the documents were genuine.
Zuckerberg said that in the first week or so after the laptop story was published, Facebook attempted to fact-check the report, and in the meantime limited the “distribution” of the story through the platform’s news feed algorithm.
“The ranking in the newsfeed was a little bit less. So fewer people saw it than would have otherwise,” he said, adding that while he couldn’t say how many users were prevented from seeing the article, the number was “meaningful.”
Though Zuckerberg continues to defend Facebook’s less extreme response, Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey has apologized for how the platform reacted to the Hunter Biden story, calling it a “total mistake.” Regardless, both decisions stoked heated condemnation from Republicans and conservative critics of the Biden family, many of whom accuse social media giants of having a left-leaning bias.
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