For Ali Hedieloo, who makes wooden furniture in Iran’s capital, Instagram is more than just a surfeit of glossy images. Like an estimated 1 million other Iranians, it’s how he finds customers, as the app has exploded into a massive e-commerce service in the sanctions-hit country.
But now, the social media platform has come under threat. Iran moved last week toward further government restrictions on Instagram and other apps, as hardline…
Top lawmakers on the Senate Commerce Committee’s consumer protection panel are pressing Facebook to release internal research on the impact of its products on youth mental health as the company presses ahead with plans for a platform geared toward children.
A group of college researchers engaged in studying political action online found out their accounts had been disabled by Facebook, who alleges the group were violating terms of service in how they were scraping data.
Facebook Inc. has disabled the personal accounts of a group of New York University researchers studying political ads on the social network, claiming they are scraping data in violation of the company’s terms of service.
The company also cut off the researchers’ access to Facebook’s APIs, technology that is used to share data from Facebook to other apps or services, and disabled other apps and Pages associated with the research project, according to Mike Clark, a director of product management on Facebook’s privacy team.
When the Chinese State wants its corporate extensions to modify their market practices in some significant way, it has a number of ways to go about doing this, but, for the sake of the preservation of the image of the benevolent dictator, the state generally chooses to send those message as gently as possible, in a public way.
Turns out, the best way to communicate to your government extension, which is what these corporations within China really are, is to simply create news shows and broadcast them across the lands and monitor anyone who tries to do the same thing but iwithout state approval.
Can’t have anyone expressing unorthodox views to the public, that’s the state’s job, responsibility, nay, right, and its right alone.
When the State saw that one of its corporate giants was producing a product that was not producing the desred effects of the state, they just create stories that broadcast this new directive in the form of concerns expressed by pretty newscasters in controlled and highly manipulated frames.
The Chinese State Media told Tencent that their games are spiritual opium and electronic drugs and need to be looked into. The company quickly issued a statement committing to the new direction, both of which caused the shares to stumble abraod.
Investors now realize they hold worthless paper should the centralized personality of Chairman Xi decide to declare whatever must be declared through their state-controlled news outliet whatever narrative gets the message across without making the state look like the heavy-handed thug it really is.
It should be noted the context of the word opium being selected, as there were a series of wars, called the Opium Wars, in the mid 1800s fought against the British by the Chinese, who were fighting the Brits’ efforts to open up China markets to grow and sell opium, to sell domestically as well as imports. Chairman Xi chose his words very well.
Shares in China’s biggest online gaming companies slumped after state media branded their products “spiritual opium” and compared them to “electronic drugs”.
The criticism – as reported by Reuters news agency – has stoked concerns that the online gaming sector will be the next to receive unwanted attention from Beijing’s regulators, following a crackdown on tech giants in the country.
Tencent’s stock tumbled by more than 10% in morning…
Facebook has relied on its non disparagement clause in employee contracts to protect it from having the messy reality of managing the thoughts, feelings, and desires of hundreds of millions of humans through their digital, server-based platform.
Now, employees are beginning to challenge the constitutionality of the clause, and legislatures are considering action to make it illegal.
California may be moving to change some of Silicon Valley’s reliance on nondisparagement agreements. In mid-August, the legislature is scheduled to vote on the Silenced No More Act, which includes protection from nondisparagement agreements in the case of workplace discrimination…..
Unfortunately, most of the people who know the most about the company’s inner workings have only been willing to speak to the press anonymously, for fear of retaliation or breach of nondisparagement agreements that are widely used in the tech world.
I worked at Facebook for about six months in 2018, hired as global head of elections integrity ops for political ads as the company attempted to dig out from its last big public relations crisis — the scandal around Cambridge Analytica’s improper use of the site’s data and Russia’s use of the platform to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. But they stripped my title and changed my job description on my second day there. I was later sidelined for questioning why we were not fact-checking political ads and for trying to help ensure that we were not allowing voter suppression to occur through these ads. After I asked to move to a different part of the company where I would be empowered to do the job I was hired to do, I was fired.
Sometimes moral panics emerge, sometimes they are engineered. The Nazi boogeyman is the kind of moral panic that is engineered, and seeking to make the world safe by preventing dangerous thoughts and misinformation is far more tyrannical than the alleged boogeyman such moral panics, including this one, actually represent.
The moral panics around anyone finding “bad” content online are getting out of control. The latest is a truly silly article in the San Francisco Chronicle whining about the fact that there is Nazi content available on the Internet Archive, written by the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, Steven Stalinsky, who is quite perturbed that his own personal content moderation desires are not how the Internet Archive moderates.
By Bill Collier- We don’t trust any major “platform” or even any US or international institution, to tell the truth, to play fair, or to look out for the good of the people and we have very good reasons to exercise a healthy and robust level of skepticism.
The fact people trust our national and international establishment and its ruling class and that they are outraged others are skeptical is amazing! The “disinformation” and other labels designed to force-feed parroted lines and cancel the skeptical should be all the proof you need not to trust any of these people or institutions.
Misinformation is the new rallying cry for modern authoritarians, especially the monopolistic platform owners, who want to silence and disappear all dissent from the Democratic Party line. Those who doubt and dissent from the preachments of the intelligence community, the science community, health care institutions, the press, the platforms, academia, and the entertainment industry as well as near-monopoly corporations are accused of “misinformation” and “canceled.”
Put another way, the owners of the major platforms and the press are almost entirely partisan Democrats for whom the advancement of the Democratic Party is their greatest goal.
Honestly, WHY should you trust a government or any leading national or international institution after the last few decades of gross, dangerous, and outlandish lies going back to “weapons of mass destruction” and the so-called “Russia collusion” scandal? Why trust that anything these institutions say is reliable or even aboveboard?
The corruption of these institutions, whereby holders of power abuse their position and cover up their failures, is all-too well known. We cannot reasonably trust anything these institutions and their ruling class say or do as anything that is truly meant to enrich themselves and not the country or its people.
The truth is, the platforms especially, and all major institutions controlled by the Democratic Party, want to desperately avoid accountability and allow a group of less than 20 major power brokers determine who can speak and what they can say. In such an environment, when all the DNC-controlled institutions parrot the same lines, the thoughtful person has strong reasons to view such preachments with extreme caution. Quite simply, we know they lie, we know they suppress dissent, and we know they have demonstrated criminal incompetence that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Those who parrot all the typical lines coming from America’s neocommunist wokatariate, the wokecomms, and their Party, the Democratic Party, often pretend they are thinking for themselves and are somehow on the “cutting edge” or even “on the right side of history.” Everything from the alt gender rainbow intolerance for traditional views on marriage and family to the mass inoculations of the entire population over the pandemic, is colored by the desire of the ruling class to gain monopoly power once and for all.
It is not “radical” to say “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death form your ability to say it.” Now the Democratic Party and the institutions it controls, such as the US Capital Police and the CDC, want to tell us what kind of speech is permissible. They use hobgoblins and imaginary threats like white supremacy, hate speech, and misinformation but the only Party benefited by these arbitrary claims which they cannot support with logic or evidence are the billionaire owners of the Democratic Party.
If you consider yourself woke and then consider that all your major ideas and the things that animate you are quite literally being force-fed to the population while everyone who disagrees faces being canceled, don’t imagine you are on any cutting edge or that you are on the right side of history.
The ideas you parrot and think are so edgy are ideas that demand and require authoritarian measures to enforce them. For any decent, thinking person, this is itself proof that those ideas, including the whole alt gendered rainbow panapoly of identities and enforced compliance, and all the other mantras of the establishment, are garbage.
Skepticism about the preachments of the leading national and international institutions is reasonable and could be life-saving.
The Upadaria platform is many things and it is at its heart a vision come true, a vision initially seen by first founder Willem IV (myself) in 1982. We can say that what we are building in terms of our platform and other genesis structures is designed as our best understanding of a God-ordained vision for a spiritual nation as the vanguard people of a new civilization. So to that degree, aligning these things with a vision that was tested against the Bible, logic, history, and science for 40 years, is actually our chief aim. We know that if we build according to God’s blueprint, good things will happen for everyone involved.
But the Upadaria Platform, called “The Virtual Commonwealth of Upadaria”, is a place that does three key things for its subscribers who purchase eResident and eCitizen subscription packages:
1. It provides useful and edifying content that subscribers can use in their daily life to build freedom and prosperity
2. It provides systemic and immersive learning experiences, through active participation and even role-playing, so that the individual subscriber can become more fulfilled and empowered
3. It provides virtual-to-local gathering and connections opportunities via social networking and e-commerce features that result in building your own network of fellow travelers whose beliefs, values, and convictions harmonize with your own
This latter aspect of the community is important. Through Upadaria you will experience life first in your own mind and imagination, we use the context and nomenclature of a future history written in 2147 to immerse yourself mind into a different, ideal reality. This is necessary to help you see past, through, and over all the artificial constraints and hindrances of the present sociocultural and socioeconomic situation.
Upadaria as a platform is, among other things, a virtual gathering place for people who want to adopt a spiritual nationality they can positively say is under the rulership of Yeshua, the Christ and Son of God. Being connected to such a nation of people, even though they own no land and have no political or military power, is a sure path to walking in those blessings and provisions reserve for such nations whose God is the Lord.
The immersive learning experiences and role-playing and the creation of this ideal persona within an ideal situation are not the goal. They get you to a different kind of goal that really amounts to establishing kinship type commuties of trust through freewill participation alone. More significantly, you find a community of people, some as virtual connections and some as local connections, with whom warm, accepting, and trust-based fraternal bonds can be made. In short, you experience warmth and acceptance.
From this, while not every subscriber will opt in, a nation of people emerges from within many lands and kindreds and among all the so-called “races.” Gathering hundreds of thousands of people, of whom some to many will choose become the genesis founders and builders of a new nation that is distributed all over the world, is not the only purpose of Upadaria. But it is a key purpose and we certainly want to be totally up front and transparent about that.
Over and over again we will say: we provide options, we don’t impose demands. We offer you things like our immersive learning experiences which are tailored to meeting real needs and improving your quality of life.
Even if at first you feel put off by the “role-playing”, it’s not just fun, it has a serious and transfigurative experience. It’s also a safe and easy way to build new and positive connections on the basis of recognizing and nurturing the person you ideally wish to become. We are certain that you will find this experience to be extremely welcoming and hopeful.
Upadaria will exist outside the realm of the establishment technocracy and its ecosystem but it is not just another alt tech platform free-for-all where anything goes. It is an experience like nothing else out there right now.
Coming in to Upadaria you are a refugee fleeing from some form of oppression or persecution during the timeline of events that led to the rise of a new national people and the emergence of a new civilization even as many of the older civilizations underwent downfall and/or upheaval. This “narrative history” informs our immersive learning experience, shapes the way our platform is run as well as its features and organization/governance, and even guides, albeit not literally, our actual real-world aims.
To see and experience, even if initially in imagination, what it is like to be part of a nation whose God is the Lord, to experience life within a Christ-centered and Kingdom-focused civilization, and to experientially learn how to manifest this inner, imagined reality into your life and relationships, is a truly innovative, original, and powerful thing.
You will learn these things in Upadaria and experience them, but you will also build real relationships and have real social and economic interactions with your fellow Upos, people who are eCitizens of the Virtual Commonwealth of Upadaria. Options such a earning digital credits, using currencies, and even our own cryptocurrency will give you new ways to advance your prosperity through participation in our internal economy.
Our platform is also designed to be as outward facing as it is private. In other words, if you want your content, like your blog or business listing, to be seen by the public and broadcast to the public, you can do that. But by default all groups and forums and your own content are limited to either your followers or the internal community. Your personal identity, which we can confirm so that people know you are real, is private. Your persona, your Upo self, has their own name which you will choose as and when you become a confirmed eCitizen.
There are basically three types of subscriptions; Guests who have a free visa and limited access, eResidents who pay $15/month for more expanded access and some features, and eCitizens who pay $45/month but for a whole experience and way to either promote themselves or use networking to advance their career, business, or ministry.
Different types of eCitizen are all the same price but are granted based on things you do to advance your status and standing and/or different charters or pledges based on your beliefs and convictions. The basic types include simple eCitizens whose only status is eCitizen, Freeholders who adopt the Freedomist Pledge, Ecclesians who are confirmed followers of Yeshua.(Christians of all denominations), Peers who are eCitizens that adopt the 17 Protocols of Upadaria, Electors who are Peers who formally joined the Upadarian Commonwealth Society International, and Nobles who are Electors who are advancing along “The Path of Honor.”
Lots of other ways to earn status and standing and be recognized for your achievements exist and, as the community grows, more benefits and features for all types of subscribers will be unlocked. Our purpose here it to foster personal growth, advancement, and development and to give many organic opportunities for people to build meaningful connections.
Immerse yourself into a new reality that transcends the present and unleashes who you truly are in all your God-ordained possibilities!
“Buying into” and virtually living out our narrative timeline is not mandatory, you can just become an e-Citizen and enjoy the features, the content, and social interactions through your profile and followers, your blog and other blogs, through the classified ads, the business directory, and through groups and forums. But if you really want Upadaria to be more than a good platform but something that inspires you and awakens your own inner and God-ordained dreams, then give the whole immersive learning experience thing a good try.
Why is Upadaria a paid platform and not open and free to all?
Essential to our vision is the creation of genesis structures which we believe are essential for comings times of crisis and to fund the first projects, like our world HQ, the first missionary and refugee support hubs, and other projects, mostly through a crowdfunding effort. While subscribing to Upadaria is worth it, it is also being part of a crowdfunding effort.
The second reason this is important is that we definitely do not want a wildly incoherent mass influx of million of free users who will require serious moderation and governance and who could literally just be trolls come to discredit us. The paid subscription model means that even if we see a large influx of people, we will always have the means to provide good moderation and governance and even to give them a personalized support system, like a Guide who may only service around 1200 subscribers (which is not as work intense as it may seem) or a volunteer Assistant Guide who may only serve 100 or fewer subscribers and earn perks within the platform.
Finally, but of equal importance, we don’t ever want to be beholden to corporate advertisers who will make demands on content and moderation that don’t align with our views or the interests of the kind of freedom seekers who tend toward being socially conservative that we expect to gather.
As we grow our support base we will explore ways to bring in people of more limited means and help them to eventually stand on their own and be able to afford a subscription. We will not leave people behind, and we offer plenty of free content on our main website, but initially we need to find people who can afford to subscribe and thereby back our overall vision.
Upadaria is neither a free speech platform nor is it in any way a place to bash other people. We are positively for our way of life, based on the 17 Protocols of Upadaria, but we are not against anyone else. We desire only freewill participation, not control or coercion, either for ourselves or others. Most of our content and activities center on a fictional future history written in 2147 AD. Most of our contemporary focus on politics in general is to promote ways for communities of people like those who embrace our intentional nationality to gain more sociocultural and socioeconomic autonomy within existing or new legal structures.
As to the whole Upadarian nationality, unless you are an Elector, as in a member of our international mutual benefit, missionary, and refugee society, you don’t have to literally consider yourself a Upadarian national in your “meta” life outside of Upadaria. But, on the other hand, anyone CAN choose to adopt this particular nationality by making a pledge between God and themselves alone to aspire to use and fulfill as many of these Protocols as God gives the means to do!
People don’t have to join Upadaria, as in the platform, to become a Upadarian by nationality. Additionally, people can only “adopt” this nationality for their “persona” without feeling like they have to transfer that identity into their meta reality. Moreover, people can be eCitizens of various types without even adopting the Upadarian nationality for their Upo Persona.
Everything we offer is on a “can do” as opposed to “must do”, basis and there are many ways to experience happy social and other interactions and benefits in your own way or through prescribed pathways. It’s always your choice and our hope is to give you good choices.
Upadaria isn’t for everybody. Our vision for web 3.0 is a diversity of niche communities eventually connected to a broad organic and decentralized ecosystem that will allow interconnections and cross-platform communications. Upadaria is our initial niche community, others, including free models based on other funding models, can either be created by us or nurtured and inspired by us which connect to a universal backbone not controlled by the establishment technocracy.
As for Upadaria, generally if you are more socially conservative, if you have a Judeo-Christian worldview, and if you are serious about fulfillment, being your best, and becoming prosperous and successful in an ethical manner consistent with your values, then Upadaria is going to be a good fit!
If you legitimately could be called a racist, a bigot, a totalitarian, a communist, a neonazi, a fascist, or a nationalist in a racial sense, then you will find Upadaria to be too “liberal” and “diverse” for your liking. We don’t bash, judge, or condemn others, we simply propose that “the Upadarian Way” is our sociocultural choice and norm and the basis of our freewill association.
We believe that the Upadaria Platform represents not simply a piece of new technology. It’s features may have an interesting application and feel, you be the judge, but it’s true innovations come through its people, connections, its learning experiences, and its virtual-to-local approach to gathering people for activities and functions.
We want the platform to be professional and highly functional and we will ever explore advancements in its technology, but we also believe that the cheif elements of value are a place where you can be accepted and valued, a place where you can experience warm and caring relationships, a place where you can find your true God-ordained purpose and potential, and a place where you can materially benefit from mutual support and commerce.
Upadaria isn’t anything you have ever experienced and while you can enter slowly and learn gradually, bit by bit in manageable pieces, there are many ideas, methods, and principles you can explore that could take you literally months or years to experience. It’s a whole vast new realm of new ideas and possibilities that you can adapt to your daily life as you choose.
A worldwide panic happened yesterday when a number of major sites, including Amazon and, gasp, Steam, went down as a result of an attack or a glitch that knocked out some major DNS servers. Fortunuately, we all pushed through and we can now once again play games and buy games online.
Video games, travel, web streaming services, banking, and shipping are among the industries affected by a problem with cloud provider Akamai Technologies, which appears to have taken thousands of websites offline worldwide.
Google, AT&T, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and GoDaddy domain services were among the companies that started reporting outages on Thursday morning.
Akamai is experiencing a service disruption. We are actively investigating the issue and…
Publisher, Bill Collier- People who spread misinformation are a bane to our existence, especially when they do so knowingly and also when they don’t do the basic due diligence necessary to screen out ridiculous claims. The problem is that the definition of misinformation, like other bogeyman fears being used to perpetuate authoritarianism, gets all too broad and the response becomes both immediately draconian, canceling the malefactors from the digital commons, and unforgiving, never giving a path to redemption or rehabilitation.
Democrats have more concern for rehabilitating gangs and criminals than they do for people who they deem worthy of digital banishment within a society whose best opportunities and social activities exist mostly within and through the digital commons.
The digital commons is, like it or not, essential to equal opportunity and prosperity in our society and banishing people from this commons for anything less than absolutely criminal conduct, and banishing them for life, deprives them of equal access to all this society offers. It should be considered very seriously and with hesitation and no longer be treated as just removing someone from a private space and not a big deal. This old civilization with its latter-days authoritarianism (so typical of old civilizations) is literally creating the disaffected “internal proletariat” whose ideas and philosophy become the basis of a new civilizational paradigm.
The latest gambit by yet about President to resort to fear-mongering and broad generalizations in order to throttle discourse, wherein platforms are being nudged by government to do what it cannot do and ruin the lives of people whose speech the Democrats (in this case) don’t fancy, is likely to be nuked from orbit by the courts. Making a private entity an agent of a government policy that seeks to punish, albeit not through legal means, anyone they deem to be spreading misinformation is not going to survive many court proceedings.
What is more, the creators of a new web 3.0 digital commons are bound to look askance at any government telling them and their digital communities who to banish! Within 20 years, we predict, all those platforms that “cooperate” in digital banishment for too weak a cause will be left behind in the coming digital age. Digital communities with maximum participatory self-governance and fraternal connections as their basis will eventually, slowly but surely, replace platforms as the new digital commons.
The national pastime of labeling everything you and your Party disagree with “misinformation” is too well established for most fair-minded people to think anyone, including a privately owned platform, is standing on strong moral ground when they arbitrarily label content disinformation and use it to do real social and economic harm to people through banishment from the digital commons.
Even if we agree a private platform has great latitude in who it banishes, this doesn’t mean we think their trigger-happy approach to banishment using opaque standards that cannot be consistently applied with rigor is a good idea morally or for the long-term health of the platform. We certainly think it is a good idea to view any “collaboration” between massive, near-monopoly platforms where the digital commons mostly exists (and outside of which individuals will increasingly face a reduction in opportunities and social connections), with grave concern.
Not all cooperation is bad. But too much can blur the line between state and platform in such a way that an essentially private digital commons is de facto, even if not de jure, molded by a state controlled by a Party with strong authoritarian leanings.
It is true, actual misinformation can harm people. If you put it out there that everyone from one demographic are a hazard to justice or equity or anything, when that’s a gross exaggeration or generalization, that’s misinformation. It’s wrong. It should be called out and confronted and if a direct link between the propagation of that misinformation and real harm to other can be proven, then criminal persecution isn’t off the table. A tort has occurred.
People saying patently false and provably inaccurate things that cause harm to others, where a direct link can be proven, should face consequences, including civil lawsuits.
But we know Democrats today, and it could be Republicans tomorrow, tend to paint a rather broad stroke when they invoke the accusation of misinformation. This is the reason why one Jen Psaki, the Press Secretary, doubling down on the government “working with” (pressuring) platforms to banish people from the digital commons for anything the White House deems “misinformation” is such a hyperbolic non-starter.
The otherwise charming and adroit Press Secretary has clearly become divorced from that strong American tradition of tolerance: e.g. “I might not like or agree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”
The Press Secretary could have clearly stated that if people are illegally spreading falsehoods to gain profit (and clicks are profit) that are harming people that the government urges platforms to be proactive in flagging that. But we know that talk of the possibility a certain virus had its genesis in a lab in China became prima facae evidence of misinformation that was banishable! Now that theory is revived and is not misinformation. Sadly, those already banished for stating that theory remain banished.
The administration has a few hobby horses such as “muh white supremacy” and racism, the election, the January 6th “insurrection”, climate change, and the virus all of which include some degree of accusing anyone who disagrees of “misinformation.” It is therefore a bad faith claim to say that the spirit behind such nonsensical and untenable rhetoric about banishing people for misinformation is at all about public safety.
We would perhaps be more worried if this wasn’t just more rhetorical flash to appease the authoritarian base of the Democratic Party and if it wasn’t so laughably untenable both from a legal and public support perspective. We would not be surprised to find such “collaboration” is anything more than happy talk and that no real collaboration is happening.
The public aren’t ready to let Jen Psaki, or even Donald Trump, become the arbiter of what is or isn’t misinformation and the trend toward banishment from the digital commons is going to boomerang “bigly” on the technocrats and their Democratic Party pals. Web 3.0, the digital commons built around diverse digital communities within a decentralized but compatible ecosystem, is coming and it couldn’t come soon enough.
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