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Have you ever said something you later wish you wouldn't have said? We all have.
Not to worry if you use Twitter.
The social media giant is now overseeing your comments and will prompt you before you hit "tweet" if it's something they feel you shouldn't say.
It will help you to think correctly, and will protect the public from being infected by "wrongthink."
A new era in the battle for the mind.
Be informed.
Today is National Day of Prayer. This is a link to the official website. Be sure to take time today to pray with millions of other Christians for our country and our President.
Reuters is reporting that Twitter will test sending users a prompt when they reply to a tweet using "offensive or harmful language."
When users hit "tweet" on their reply, they will be told if the words in their tweet are similar to those in posts that have been reported, and asked if they would like to revise it or not.
Sunita Saligram, Twitter's global head of site policy for trust and safety, says:
"We're trying to encourage people to rethink their behavior and rethink their language before posting because they often are in the heat of the moment and they might say something they regret."
The company has already taken action against almost 396,000 accounts under its abuse policies and more than 584,000 accounts under its hateful conduct policies according to its own transparency report.
We all get sick of trash talk on social media, but does it concern you that Twitter is so committed to you and your well being that they help you before you do or say something wrong or inappropriate?
In the 2002 Tom Cruise film "Minority Report," they called it "precrime" actions. Twitter will notice when you're about to do something wrong and save you from yourself.
Kind of like becoming your conscience and guide.
Twitter is looking out for you. Right?
Not really.
In January 2018, James O'Keefe and his "Veritas Project" discovered that it really isn't about you, it's about them, and their agenda.
The link gives a detailed account of the background of what was introduced this week by Twitter. Here's a brief overview.
In 2018 O'Keefe sat down with several employees and decision-makers at Twitter. Not knowing who he was, they spoke openly and transparently about their biases and how they were planning to manage the conversations and content.
Breitbart News had been reporting on what then became confirmed.
1. Shadowbanning.
Twitter maintains a "whitelist" of favored Twitter accounts and a "blacklist" of unfavored accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritized in search results, even if they're not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other user's timelines.
The motive of shadowbanning is that they can ban someone but they don't know they've been banned.
A former software engineer told O'Keefe: "But at the end of the day, no one interacts...No one else sees what you're doing. So, all that data is just thrown away. It's risky though. Because people will figure that [expletive] out and be like...[expletive]."
2. Liberal bias.
Pranay Singh, a direct messaging engineer at Twitter, spoke on camera with Veritas and explained how conservative accounts are actually targeted en-mass using machine learning. When asked how you can tell if an account is a bot or a normal person, she said:
"You use machine learning. You look at Trump, or America, or any of like 5000, like Keywords to describe a red neck. And then you look and you like, parse all the messages, all, like, the pictures, and then you look for , like stuff that matches...you like assign a value to each thing, so like Trump would be , like, .5, a picture of a gun would be like a 1.5, and like if ...a certain value comes up you know its a bot."
She explained you can't physically delete all of them so you write algorithms that do it for you. She says the majority are Republicans, and describes this as a profile:
"They'll all be like guns, God, 'Merica', like with the American flag and, like, the cross...like who says that? Who talks like that?"
3. Prominent conservatives targeted.
Twitter's policy manager Olinda Hassan actually told O'Keefe that the company was working on preventing certain Twitter users from appearing in users' timelines.
She said: "We're trying to down rank it, but you also need to have control of your timeline...Yeah, that's something we're working on...We're trying to get the [expletive] people to not show up."
Apparently, they were unable to get the [expletive] people to stop showing up on social media.
Now they are focused on retraining the thinking of the people with which they could not dispose of.
Google is targeting your children.
Michelle Malkin published this warning to all parents yesterday.
This is an overview:
Schools remain shuttered across the country, 30 million Americans are out of work, and food banks are running low, but the edutech sector is booming. Silicon Valley companies are feasting on an exploding client base of quarantined students held hostage to "online learning." Big Google is leading the way – and that is not OK.
Unsuspecting parents cheering all the software and hardware donations during the pandemic shutdown have no idea the privacy price their children are paying. This isn't charity. It's big tech recruitment of vulnerable generations of future Google addicts. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Google inked a deal to provide 4,000 "free" Chromebooks to students, along with "free" Wi-Fi to 100,000 families. In Kentucky, the Jefferson County public schools gave away 25,000 Chromebooks. In Philadelphia, public officials earmarked $11 million to purchase 40,000 Chromebooks for homebound kids.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai crowed a few weeks ago that the company now has 100 million students and educators hooked on Google Classroom. Bent on conquering the virtual meeting market, the online giant announced that its premium Google Meet videoconferencing features are now free to all 80 million customers of its G Suite for Education apps through the fall. Google Meet is racking up 2 million new users a day as school districts abandon Zoom, the dominant virtual meeting app that recently admitted "mistakenly" routing non-Chinese calls through its Beijing-based data centers.
But if educators think Google will provide more protections for American students than the ChiCom government, they're blind, dumb or bought off....
Despite signing a "Student Privacy Pledge" promising not to collect, share and retain private personal data, Google Chromebooks scan students' faces and unique acoustic details of students' voices to identify them by name, age, gender and location while using Google platforms.
Lawsuits have been, and are now being filed by parents. There's much more information in Malkin's story. Please take a moment and read it---especially if you have kids or grandkids studying at home.
Be pro-active.
Every day in this blog and on our daily radio program, I try to motivate, inform, and encourage Christians not to sit on the sidelines or be spectators in the stands as the battle rages.
Become involved in whatever opportunity avails itself to you. Support those who are in the battle.
My prayer is that we, in this generation, will respond much differently than did the people of Israel in Elijah's day: "the people said nothing" (I Kings 18:21).
Be Informed. Be Vigilant. Be Discerning. Be Bold. Be Faithful. Be Prayerful.