News of the Cyber World

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Google Censors Campaign Websites of Republicans, RFK Jr.

Campaign websites for Democrats who ran in the 2020 primaries are appearing higher in Google search results than the websites of Republican candidates in 2024, as well as the campaign websites of Joe Biden’s top challenger in the Democrat primary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Media Research Center (MRC), which monitors bias in media and tech companies, discovered the biased search results when conducting searches on Google for “presidential campaign websites.”

MRC Free Speech America researchers searched Google for “presidential campaign websites,” but the search engine did not display a single Republican candidate on its first page of results the day before the first Republican Party presidential primary debate on Wednesday. President Joe Biden’s campaign website, of course, showed up as the second search result along with a Democratic Party challenger Marianne Williamson’s campaign website, which came up as the fifth result.

Google even displayed results for past failed Democratic Party presidential candidates who aren’t even running this cycle, including: Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) website, which showed up as the ninth result; Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) campaign website, which came in twelfth; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign website, which appeared twenty-ninth in the results.

Notably, 2024 Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., did not appear in Google’s search results even though he is, at present, the biggest threat to President Joe Biden’s nomination.

Of all major tech companies, Google and its related companies seem most committed to maintaining a pro-establishment Democrat bias. While other tech companies, notably Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, have claimed to relax some of the draconian censorship measures against conservatives, Google has ramped them up. YouTube, its video platform, recently doubled down on its COVID censorship policies, and has repeatedly censored interviews with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Facebook ‘Fact Checkers’ Try to Influence
Australian Referendum on ‘Indigenous Rights’

Sky News Australia has published an in-depth report about a full throttle attempt to influence the outcome of a democratic referendum in the country. Facebook (now known as Meta) and a legion of supposedly third-party “fact checkers” are shutting down journalists and activists who oppose the referendum in an effort to silence dissent.

The referendum concerns a hot-button issue for the Australian left, the proposed creation of The Voice, a representative body based on ethnic lines, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders, that would act as an advisory body to the Australian parliament.

According to Sky News, Facebook, along with a coalition of international “fact checkers,” is working to skew debate on social media in favor of creating the proposed representative body, which will be put to a vote of the Australian people later this year.

Two of Australia’s most powerful universities and a multi-billion dollar tech giant are fronting campaigns to silence news coverage of the Voice to influence the referendum.

A Sky News Australia investigation has uncovered a disturbing foreign-financed attempt to block political debate and news coverage around the Voice, which exposes the global fact checking system used by tech giant Meta as non-compliant with its own rules of impartiality and transparency.

In one case, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has been allowed by Facebook parent company Meta to block and deplatform Australian journalism, despite the platform knowing it was a breach of the rules Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg established to distance himself from fact checking responsibilities.

According to Sky News, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), a Facebook-approved fact checker, breached their own rules to throttle Sky’s distribution on the platform.

AI-Generated Spam Bots Are Flooding Social Media, Scamming Humans

A recent study by Indiana University researchers reveals a surge in AI-generated spam bots on social media platforms, particularly exploiting OpenAI’s ChatGPT to promote scams and degrade online information quality.

Business Insider reports that researchers at Indiana University have uncovered a disturbing trend — the proliferation of AI-generated spam bots on social media platforms. The study found that over 1,000 such bots were active on Twitter/X. These bots are part of larger networks, commonly referred to as “botnets,” which have been designed to evade current anti-spam measures. According to researchers, bot accounts try to persuade individuals to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrencies and may even pilfer from their current crypto wallets.
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“New AI tools further lower the cost to generate false but credible content at scale, defeating the already weak moderation defenses of social-media platforms,” said Filippo Menczer, a computer-science professor involved in the study. The bots not only promote fraudulent investments but also contribute to the degradation of the quality of online information.
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Current AI content detectors, such as ZeroGPT and the OpenAI AI Text Classifier, have proven to be unreliable. Wei Xu, a computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has cautioned that without proper regulation, bad actors will continue to stay ahead of those attempting to stop AI-generated content creation due to the availability of more incentives and lower costs.

Widow Files Lawsuit Against Tesla over Fatal Crash and Explosion

TechCrunch reports that a woman named Jiyoung Yoon has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Tesla after her husband, Jyung Woo Hahn, tragically lost his life in a devastating crash. The incident occurred on March 12, 2022, when Hahn was driving his 2020 Tesla Model 3 on the Palisades Interstate Parkway in Rockland County, New York. According to the lawsuit, the vehicle malfunctioned and collided with a tree, immediately bursting into flames.

Yoon alleges in the lawsuit that her husband survived the initial impact but was unable to escape the fast-burning vehicle. Firefighters who arrived at the scene reported that the fire was “extremely difficult” to put out, requiring more than 1,000 gallons of water.

The lawsuit points to the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery as a significant factor in the tragedy. When a lithium-ion battery is ruptured, a process called thermal runaway occurs, leading to a sharp increase in battery cell temperature and pressure. This results in the release of flammable gas, which can ignite due to the battery’s high temperature, causing a quick fire that is hard to extinguish and emits toxic fumes.
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Yoon accuses Tesla of multiple counts of negligence, including producing a vehicle that is “defective and unreasonably dangerous.” She also alleges that Tesla is guilty of breach of implied warranty of merchantability. The plaintiff is demanding a jury trial and is seeking various forms of damages, including actual damages, lost wages, emotional distress, and more.