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In this mailing:
* Robert Epstein: Election Integrity's Biggest Threat: Big Tech
* Amir Taheri: Iran and Its Culture War


** Election Integrity's Biggest Threat: Big Tech ([link removed])
Why Republicans Cannot Win; Monitor Tech Manipulations, Make Findings Public
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by Robert Epstein • April 30, 2023 at 5:00 am
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tute.org%2F19608%2Felection-threat-big-tech&pubid=ra-52f7af5809191749&ct=1&title=Election+Integrity%27s+Biggest+Threat%3A+Big+Tech [link removed]
* [T]ech companies... can flip elections any and all ways they please without anyone knowing.
* When you monitor, you can catch them in their shenanigans, and you can get them to back down. We got Google to back down by exposing some of the manipulations that they were engaging in in the presidential election.
* You may not have heard the term "ephemeral experiences" before.... These are very brief experiences that we all have online every day. They are things like newsfeeds, search results, search suggestions, sequences of YouTube videos. None of that is recorded anywhere. It affects us, as Google executives know full well.
* It just appears, we click, and it disappears. It is stored nowhere, it leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. It can be used to manipulate, and it is being used to manipulate very deliberately and strategically, especially at Google. I think some of the other companies as well have been catching on, especially Facebook.
* [A]s of 2015, you could shift so many votes that way that we calculated that upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world – the outcomes of those elections – were being determined by Google's search engine.
* [These manipulations] are shifting people's opinions week by week. [They] are shifting people out of the undecided group into the other groups. People are making up their minds, but because of the bias in search results, anything that they search on, anything political at all, is leading them to web pages that make one candidate look better than the other....
* You play that forward for six months. When you get to the election, you have an enormous gap. You have created a gap of more than 100,000 people between the votes we shift into Democrats and the votes we shift to Republicans – with no one knowing and with no paper trail. That is roughly how this works.
* [I]n 2016, my team and I developed the first-ever system for doing to the tech companies what they do to us.... [W]e are monitoring what they are showing real people on those screens.
* [I]n all the days we looked at before the election, we saw pro-Hillary Clinton bias and never any pro-Trump bias. I was a Clinton supporter, so that was fine with me, but do we really want private companies manipulating elections on a large scale with no one knowing and without leaving a paper trail?... If that bias had been present for six months, millions of votes would have been shifted with no one knowing.
* Some people saw vote reminders on Google's home page. Some people saw vote reminders for months. That too can shift votes.... [It] can determine who sends in mail ballots and can also determine who registers to vote.
* What you see again is that pattern. It is so disturbing. The highest level of those vote reminders was seen by moderates, then liberals, then conservatives at the bottom: fewer vote reminders going to one particular political group. Over time, that has an incredible impact on an election.
* This is not like all the nonsense you see about – and I'm sorry if I'm offending anyone – but the nonsense about voter fraud. Those are tiny incidents compared to what is happening here on a massive scale. That is because Google search results are seen each day in the United States 500 million times.
* This is not like stuffing a ballot box with a few hundred ballots. This is a massive manipulation. That is why monitoring has to be set up. No laws, no regulations will ever stop this. Monitoring can stop it cold.
* As far as I know, I'm the only one in the world doing this research and this monitoring. That is because Google is paying off everyone else.
* [A]pparently by going public with our findings in October and November and December of 2020, we got Google to stay out of Georgia. This [graph] shows you bias on the Google search engine. That line, it is practically at zero.... Google sent out no go‑vote reminders in Georgia. This tells you, you see, that you can get these companies to back down.
* When it comes to control over the gateway to all information around the world, I am sorry, but they have to be strictly regulated. It is not going to happen, however, because Google owns the Democrats, and the Republicans do not like regulation.
* If the government passes any kind of legislation at all, if they change any regulations at all, it is all going to be completely toothless. A lot of these people are in Google's pocket. Even conservative organizations. A lot of conservative organizations now are accepting money, large donations, from Google.
* Our children are being brainwashed 24 hours a day by these tech companies. I have five children. I am very concerned about this. I do not want my kids and grandkids growing up in a world that is literally being run by private tech companies.
* [To monitor Big Tech] the on nonprofit side [will take] $50 million. We do not need it all at once. To set up the system in all 50 states, that is a $50 million project. Roughly a million dollars per state. That will allow us to keep the thing going for a long time. In other words, part of that money will be going towards development efforts.
* Then for people who want to make investments on the for‑profit side, we are willing to work with people, because there is room here to establish a for‑profit company – a Hewlett Packard, if you want to think of it that way – that provides commercial services for organizations, campaigns, law firms, companies of all sorts that want to monitor these tech companies.
* I have no idea at the moment what the Supreme Court will do because... conservatives are very anti‑regulation. People do not understand that we have to make an exception for these tech companies.
* We have to understand that [the services they provide] are as essential now as air and water. They must be regulated. Access to all information, the gateway to all information – that has to be regulated. Our brains are shaped according to the information we receive. We have to protect that process.
* You cannot break up the Google search engine. It will not work.... By the way, Google is one of Elizabeth Warren's major donors. I bet you that breakup plan that she proposed was actually developed at Google.
* If you "break up big tech," all you are doing is forcing them to sell off a few of the companies they bought. Google buys on average another company every week. [A "breakup" will] just enrich them....
* It does not take away the three big threats: The threat to democracy, the threat to free speech, and of course the manipulation and the surveillance that is occurring. "Breaking them up" will have no impact on the big threats that these companies pose.
* When it comes to politics, we have to face the sad truth. People are generally out for themselves. They often put their personal priorities and their desire to get reelected ahead of their ideals, the ideals of this country, or the ideals that are embodied in the constitution. We have all seen this over and over again.
* I published an article... in the Epoch Times explaining why, in general, Republicans cannot win. It is because there are so many different methods available to these tech companies for manipulating opinions and votes without people's awareness. We have discovered about a dozen of them since 2013.
* Right now, we are studying one called the YouTube Manipulation Effect... We are quantifying the impact of that "up‑next" algorithm – the impact of supplying people with video after video after video, which might, in fact, be very biased, as we found in our election monitoring where highly biased videos were being suggested.
* If you think of all of these different techniques and imagine them all being used at the same time, and imagine the major tech companies all having the same politics, we are talking about an unstoppable force, especially when you throw in with that the fact that 96 percent of donations from Google go to members of one party.
* It happens to be the party that I like, but still, how do you stop a force like that that has access to all of those different means of manipulation and that is using them? That is what all the whistleblowers have told us in the past couple of years.
* That is what all the leaked documents have shown us, the leaked videos, the leaked emails. It is all very consistent. Yet these people go in front of Congress and they just lie, lie, lie.... Congress does not even call them on it.
* I saw a Google [exec] asked, under oath – I believe it was by Senator Josh Hawley – "Does Google have any blacklists?" [He replied]... under oath, on camera, "No, Senator. We do not."
* It was not many months later that Zach Vorhies, who had been a senior software engineer at Google for eight and a half years, walks out of Google with 950 pages of documents and a video, which he sent immediately to the Attorney General of the United States, in which there were blacklists, among other things – actual Google blacklists that were labeled "blacklists".... Shouldn't you call them something else?... I would. But they were actually called blacklists.
* There is a simple way to end Google's monopoly on search. Their index – their big database they use to generate search results – just make it public.
* When you consider that we are spending billions now in campaigns, $50 million to get this system going is not all that much. That is how you do it. We not only can collect the data very, very rapidly and analyze it rapidly, we know now that we can get these companies to back off.
* One of the leaks from Google, not long ago, was an eight‑minute video called "The Selfish Ledger," about the ability Google has to re‑engineer humanity according to "company values."
* Google is the biggest threat. They have the most power to manipulate, and they do so aggressively and strategically and unapologetically. They are arrogant people, in my opinion. Extremely arrogant people who think they have the power of gods. You know what? They do, and they exercise it.

(Image source: iStock)

If I could show you some of the data that we collected, you would be astounded.

There is a lot more that we can find. The bottom line on this is going to be that the types of monitoring systems that we have been developing since 2016, I am pretty sure at this point that they need to be permanent, large scale, and operating in all 50 states to protect our free-and-fair elections from interference by tech companies, which can flip elections any and all ways they please without anyone knowing.

Tech will always be far ahead of laws and regulations, but monitoring is also tech. If we are monitoring them, we are doing to them what they do to us 24/7.

When you monitor, you can catch them in their shenanigans, and you can get them to back down. As you're going to see, apparently, we got Google to back down by exposing some of the manipulations that they were engaging in before the 2020 presidential election.

Continue Reading Article ([link removed])


** Iran and Its Culture War ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • April 30, 2023 at 4:00 am
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* It was supposed to be a routine remake of scores of reportages offered by the official TV each year. The formula used is simple: A concert hall filled with a handpicked audience of carefully screened audience chanting "God is Great, Hail to Supreme Leader!" Then the "Supreme Leader" enters, accompanied by his military and clerical entourage, to sit on high chair on an elevated platform facing the audience below from a distance of 10 meters.
* As the cameras roll, the "Supreme Leader" repeats his shop-worn monologue about humbling the American "Great Satan" and wiping the "Zionist entity" from the face of the earth. He invites the young audience to prepare for martyrdom as a short-cut to a place in heaven in the next world. At the end of the ceremony, everyone shouts "Hail to the Chief" while the "Supreme Leader" exits the stage wearing a triumphal smile.
* This month, however, the segment in the 34-year old soap opera didn't go according to the script. To start with the audience, consisting of young recruits for the Baseej (Mobilization) militia, a key element in security, seemed hesitant to stand up as the chief arrived and, even worse, seemed parsimonious about shouting his adulation.
* When the "Supreme Leader" developed an argument against consulting the people via a referendum, some in the young audience started to cackle and boo. Visibly taken by surprise, the chief mumbled, "We shouldn't bang our heads against each other". Then, as the booing continued albeit in a muffled form, he announced that the session was over and hastily headed for the exit.
* The amazing extension of the cyberspace to Iran has had two crucial effects.
* It has ended the government's monopoly on sources of information and it has opened a window to the outside world which seems to live in another time-zone. Both those facts operate against a system that, struck by ideological atrophy, has failed to develop any mechanism for reform.
* Today, the official TV is watched by less than 20 percent of Iranians while foreign-based satellite TV stations, beaming from Britain the United States, have secured audiences in virtually every corner of the country. Despite repeated efforts to shut the Internet, foreign based Persian-language TV stations claim audiences topping the million mark even for question-and-answer shows with Iranians spending a fortune on phone bills to express their grievances on live TV.
* Another new fad is for young Iranians to wear the latest world-style clothes and accoutrements and take selfies for posting on social media. The idea is to show that many young Iranians, if not a majority, reject the one-size "Islamist" lifestyle that the regime has tried to impose for more than four decades.
* International media have portrayed the current tension in Iranian society as a popular movement against the officially-imposed head-covering known as "hijab". A closer look, however, shows that much more is at stake. With every day that passes, the number of women discarding the "hijab" grows while the mullahs wonder what to do.
* Since the protests started almost six months ago, at least 600 people have been killed by security forces and a further 22,000 arrested, according to official figures.
* What is going on is a cultural war between one world-view, propagated by Khomeinist ideologues, and another, defended by champions of what is called Iranism.
* For Khomeinists, Iran is just a part of a global entity with a mission to spread the "true message" to every corner of the world. Dr. Hassan Abbasi, a leading theorist of Khomeinism and known as "Kissinger of Islam", says Iran's manifest destiny is to turn the White House in Washington into a Hussaynieh, ending American global hegemony. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi talks of "burning Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground."
* To young Iranists, Iran is a reality that transcends the Islamic part of its complex identity.
* A series of opinion polls over the past three decades show that the American "Great Satan" is more popular in Iran than in France and Germany.

At a recent speech given by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei before an audience of Baseej (Mobilization) militia recruits, some in the young audience started to cackle and boo him. Visibly taken by surprise, the chief announced that the session was over and hastily headed for the exit. (Image source: khamenei.ir)

It was supposed to be a routine remake of scores of reportages offered by the official TV each year. The formula used is simple: A concert hall filled with a handpicked audience of carefully screened audience chanting "God is Great, Hail to Supreme Leader!" Then the "Supreme Leader" enters, accompanied by his military and clerical entourage, to sit on high chair on an elevated platform facing the audience below from a distance of 10 meters.

As the cameras roll, the "Supreme Leader" repeats his shop-worn monologue about humbling the American "Great Satan" and wiping the "Zionist entity" from the face of the earth. He invites the young audience to prepare for martyrdom as a short-cut to a place in heaven in the next world. At the end of the ceremony, everyone shouts "Hail to the Chief" while the "Supreme Leader" exits the stage wearing a triumphal smile.

Continue Reading Article ([link removed])

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