Quotes of the Week

“There are some people who seem to find it a very funny circumstance that last week, in full daylight, and in a main street of Cooktown, two black troopers, with their clothes in the same condition as those of a clumsy butcher’s apprentice, fresh from the shambles, exhibited a naked black girl, not twelve years old, as their newly caught prize. This young slave, taken by force . . . has since been transferred, either for payment or as a gift, to a citizen in this town, whose property she has now become. What were the circumstances that attended, or immediately followed, her capture we do not know, nor do we very much care to inquire ...”  [ Journalist & author Carl Feilberg writing in the Cooktown Courier in January 1877 ]


“Adding a new level of fear and uncertainty onto that with the findings coming out of a royal commission is going to harm the community as well as the industry,”  [CEO Clarence Village Ltd Duncan McKimm acting as an apologist for the aged care industry in The Daily Examiner ahead of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety]

July 2018 was not a good month for Zuckerberg and Facebook Inc - Channel 4 undercover investigation, a lawsuit, falling user numbers, sudden 19% drop in company value & US$12 billion hit to personal fortune

As the fall-out from manipulated US presidential campaign and UK Brexit national referendum continues try at it might Facebook Inc just can't give a cursory apology for its part in these events and mover on - users and mainstream media won't cease scutiny of its business practices.

News.com.au, 27 July 2018:

Shares in Facebook plummeted 19 per cent to $US176.26 at the end of trading on Thursday, wiping out some $US120 billion ($A160 billion) — believed to be the worst single-day evaporation of market value for any company....

Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has a 13 percent stake in Facebook, saw his fortune dropped by more than $US12 billion ($A16 billion) in less than 24 hours, to around $74 billion ($A100 billion).

The fall came after the social media giant revealed three million European users had closed their accounts since the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The record decline pushed the tech-heavy Nasdaq more than one per cent lower.

CNet, 27 July 2018:

It began Wednesday with Facebook, which announced that daily active user counts had fallen in Europe, to 279 million from 282 million earlier this year. Facebook also indicated it was no longer growing in the US and Canada, two of the most lucrative advertising markets. Just as Facebook was working through its second year of nearly nonstop scandals over unchecked political meddling and data misuse, it was becoming clear that the days of consistent and relatively easy growth were fading.

Reuters, 28 July 2018:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook Inc (FB.O) and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg were sued on Friday in what could be the first of many lawsuits over a disappointing earnings announcement by the social media company that wiped out about $120 billion of shareholder wealth.

The complaint filed by shareholder James Kacouris in Manhattan federal court accused Facebook, Zuckerberg and Chief Financial Officer David Wehner of making misleading statements about or failing to disclose slowing revenue growth, falling operating margins, and declines in active users.

Chanel4.com, news release, 17 July 2018:

Dispatches investigation reveals how Facebook moderates content

An undercover investigation by Firecrest Films for Channel 4 Dispatches has revealed for the first time how Facebook decides what users can and can’t see on the platform. (Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network, Channel 4 Dispatches, 9pm, 17 July). 

Dispatches’ investigation reveals:

       *Violent content such as graphic images and videos of assaults on children, remaining on the site, despite being flagged by users as inappropriate and requests to have it removed.

·         *Thousands of reported posts remained unmoderated and on the site while we were filming, beyond Facebook’s stated aim of a 24-hour turnaround, including potentially posts relating to suicide threats and self-harm.

·        * Moderators told not to take any action if content shows a child who is visibly below Facebook’s 13-year-old age limit, rather than report it as posted by underage users, even if the content includes self-harming.

·         *Allegations from an early Facebook investor and mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, that Facebook’s business model benefits from extreme content which engages viewers for longer, generating higher advertising revenue.

·         *Pages belonging to far-right groups, with large numbers of followers, allowed to exceed deletion threshold, and subject to different treatment in the same category as pages belonging to governments and news organisations.

·       *  Policies allowing hate speech towards ethnic and religious immigrants, and trainers instructing moderators to ignore racist content in accordance with Facebook’s policies.

      Dispatches sent an undercover reporter to work as a content moderator in Facebook’s largest centre for UK content moderation. The work is outsourced to a company called Cpl Resources plc in Dublin which has worked with Facebook since 2010. The investigation reveals the training given to content moderators to demonstrate how to decide whether content reported to them by users, such as graphic images and videos of child abuse, self-harming, and violence should be allowed to remain on the site or be deleted. Dispatches also films day-to-day moderation of content on the site, revealing:

      Violent content:

      One of the most sensitive areas of Facebook’s content rulebook is about graphic    violence. When dealing with graphic violence content, moderators have three options – ignore, delete, or mark as disturbing which places restrictions on who can see the content.

      Dispatches’ undercover reporter is seen moderating a video showing two teenage schoolgirls fighting. Both girls are clearly identifiable and the video has been shared more than a thousand times. He’s told that Facebook’s rules say that because the video has been posted with a caption condemning the violence and warning people to be careful about visiting the location where it was filmed, it should not be deleted and instead should be left on the site and marked as disturbing content. Dispatches speaks to the mother of the girl involved who tells the programme the distress and impact the video had on her daughter. She struggles to understand the decision to leave the video up on the site. “To wake up the next day and find out that literally the whole world is watching must have been horrifying. It was humiliating for her, it was devastating for her. You see the images and it’s horrible, it’s disgusting. That’s someone’s child fighting in the park. It’s not Facebook entertainment.”

      Facebook told Dispatches that the child or parent of a child featured in videos like this can ask them to be removed. Richard Allan, VP of Public Policy at Facebook said, “Where people are highlighting an issue and condemning the issue, even if the issue is painful, there are a lot of circumstances where people will say to us, look Facebook, you should not interfere with my ability to highlight a problem that’s occurred.

      Online anti-child abuse campaigner Nicci Astin tells Dispatches about another violent video which shows a man punching and stamping on a toddler. She says she reported the video to Facebook in 2012 and received a message back saying it didn’t violate its terms and conditions. The video is used during the undercover reporter’s training period as an example of what would be left up on the site, and marked as disturbing, unless posted with a celebratory caption. The video is still up on the site, without a graphic warning, nearly six years later. Facebook told Dispatches they do escalate these issues and contact law enforcement, and the video should have been removed.

      One moderator tells the Dispatches undercover reporter that “if you start censoring too much then people lose interest in the platform…. It’s all about making money at the end of the day.”

      Venture Capitalist Roger McNamee was one of Facebook’s earliest investors, a mentor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the man who brought Sheryl Sandberg to the company. He tells Dispatches that Facebook’s business model relies on extreme content:

      “From Facebook’s point of view this is, this is just essentially, you know, the crack cocaine of their product right. It’s the really extreme, really dangerous form of content that attracts the most highly engaged people on the platform. Facebook understood that it was desirable to have people spend more time on site if you’re going to have an advertising based business, you need them to see the ads so you want them to spend more time on the site. Facebook has learned that the people on the extremes are the really valuable ones because one person on either extreme can often provoke 50 or 100 other people and so they want as much extreme content as they can get.”

      Richard Allan told Dispatches: Shocking content does not make us more money, that’s just a misunderstanding of how the system works …. People come to Facebook for a safe secure experience to share content with their family and friends. The vast majority of those 2 billion people would never dream of sharing content that, like that, to shock and offend people. And the vast majority of people don’t want to see it. There is a minority who are prepared to abuse our systems and other internet platforms to share the most offensive kind of material. But I just don’t agree that that is the experience that most people want and that’s not the experience we’re trying to deliver.

      Underage users:

      No child under 13 can have a Facebook account. However, a trainer tells the undercover reporter not to proactively take any action regarding their age if the report contains an image of a user who is visibly underage, unless the user admits to being underage: “We have to have an admission that the person is underage. If not, we just like pretend that we are blind and we don’t know what underage looks like.” Even if the content contains images for self-harm for example, and the image is of someone who looks underage the user is treated like an adult and sent information about organisations which help with self-harming issues, rather than being reported for being underage: “If this person was a kid, like a 10-year-old kid we don’t care, we still action the ticket as if they were an adult.” Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that its policy is not to take action about content posted by users who appear to be underage, unless the user admits to being underage.

Hate speech:

       Dispatches’ undercover reporter is told that, while content which racially abuses protected ethnic or religious groups violates Facebook’s guidelines, if the posts racially abuse immigrants from these groups, then the content is permitted. Facebook’s training for moderators also includes a post including a cartoon comment which describes drowning a girl if her first boyfriend is a negro, as content which is permitted. Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that the picture violates their hate speech standards and they are reviewing what went wrong to prevent it from happening again.

     “Shielded Review” – Popular pages kept up despite violations:
Our undercover reporter is told that if any page is found to have five or more pieces of content that violate Facebook’s rules, then the entire page should be taken down, in accordance with the company’s policies. But we have discovered that posts on Facebook’s most popular pages, with the highest numbers of followers, cannot be deleted by ordinary content moderators at Cpl. Instead, they are referred to the Shielded Review Queue where they can be directly assessed by Facebook rather than Cpl staff. These pages include those belonging to jailed former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, who has over 900,000 followers, and who has been given the same protected status as Governments and news organisations. A moderator tells the undercover reporter that the far-right group Britain First’s pages were left up despite repeatedly featuring content that breached Facebook’s guidelines because, “they have a lot of followers so they’re generating a lot of revenue for Facebook. The Britain First Facebook page was finally deleted in March 2018 following the arrest of deputy leader Jayda Fransen.

      Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that they do have special procedures for popular and high profile pages, which includes Tommy Robinson and included Britain First.

      They say Shielded Review has been renamed ‘Cross Check’. Lord Allen told Dispatches: “if the content is indeed violating it will go….I want to be clear this is not a discussion about money, this is a discussion about political speech. People are debating very sensitive issues on Facebook, including issues like immigration. And that political debate can be entirely legitimate. I do think having extra reviewers on that when the debate is taking place absolutely makes sense and I think people would expect us to be careful and cautious before we take down their political speech.”

      Delays in moderating content:

      Facebook’s publicly stated aim is to assess all reported content within 24 hours. However, during the period of the undercover filming, Dispatches found a significant backlog. Moderators told the undercover reporter that due to the volume of reports, or tickets, they are supposed to moderate, they are unable to check up to 7,000 reported comments on a daily basis. At one point there is a backlog of 15,000 reports which have not been assessed, with some tickets are still waiting for moderation up to five days after being reported. Facebook told Dispatches that the backlog filmed in the programme was cleared by 6 April.

…/ends

[my yellow highlighting]

Australian Society 2018: male violence and sport

Counting Dead Women - 30 dead as of 14 June 2018

ABC News, 22 June 2018:

State of Origin nights see a 40 per cent increase on average in domestic assault and about a 70 per cent increase in non-domestic assaults, research out today shows.

The Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, which commissioned the study is calling on rugby league administrators to do more to reverse the trend.

The data was drawn from six years from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR).

Researchers looked at the Wednesday nights from two weeks before the State of Origin series to two weeks following.

The study compared the rates of violence between State of Origin Wednesdays and regular Wednesdays.

Dr Michael Livingstone from the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at Latrobe analysed the data for the foundation.

"It's not an usual thing to find spikes in violence or other problems around big events," Dr Livingstone said.

"But these are really quite significant jumps."

To explore the causal connection between the games and the violence levels, researchers looked at Victorian data, where State of Origin is not as big an event as it is in NSW.

They found levels of violence on State of Origin Wednesdays in Victoria were no different to other Wednesdays.

M LIVINGSTON, La Trobe University, School of Psychology and MentalHealth, June 2018, “The association between State of Origin and assaults in two Australian states”

Liberals continue to behave badly in 2018 - Part Four

FIGHTING

There’s been a fight at a Liberal Party branch meeting in Arncliffe tonight. Allegations elderly women were abused and a man assaulted. Democracy at work guys. @9NewsSyd #auspol pic.twitter.com/P77ptrLCse

— Chris O'Keefe (@cokeefe9) June 18, 2018

The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 June 2018:

Police said they were called to Naji's Charcoal Chicken & Kebabs eatery on Firth Street in Arncliffe just after seven o'clock on Monday night, following reports of a "brawl". The roast chook shop is owned by Michael Nagi, a Liberal councillor for Bayside Council.

The meeting is understood to have turned ugly after an attempt by the moderate faction, which includes Nagi, to allow into the Bayside branch a nearby area, Earlwood, which is controlled by the moderates and has never been a part of the Bayside branch.

This would have constituted what those on the right of the party would class as a "hostile takeover" of their factional control, but a resolution was never reached because the disagreement turned violent.

Police said a man believed to be aged in his forties was taken to St George Hospital and treated for minor injuries.

"Police are now attempting to piece together exactly what happened and how many people were involved," a statement read.

"They are appealing for anyone who may have vision of the incident to come forward."

The Liberal Party said it would "fully cooperate" with police, as well as make their own inquiries.

"An internal investigation will also be undertaken and disciplinary action taken against those responsible," the party said.

"The Liberal Party strongly condemns the kind of behaviour that is alleged to have occurred."

ABC News, 19 June 2018:

One witness, who did not want to be identified, described the situation as an attempted "hostile takeover" of the branch.

"Just before the meeting started, there was an altercation where some people were intimidating and swearing and pushing and shoving of the others who belonged to the meeting," he said.

"Others outside were blocked from entering the meeting."

The man said an elderly lady inside the cafe was "trampled on", and a man who tried to intervene was "ganged up on".

"They started bashing him … they took him outside and started kicking him.

"To be honest I thought he was going to die."

The man also said some people tried to film the incident, but their phones were taken and smashed.

COMPLAINTS, DEBTS AND WORKING THE SYSTEM

“Two hundred thousand Australian dollars.….that’s not a lot of money” [Liberal Sen. Lucy Gichuhi speaking about here Australian parliamentary salary package on Kenyan television in January 2018]

Daily Mail, 20 June 2018:

Embattled Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi was taken to court seven times for failing to pay $8,359 worth of council rates and $1,372 in water bills.

Court documents obtained exclusively by Daily Mail Australia show the Kenyan-born federal MP faced legal action from City of Port Adelaide Enfield council, Whyalla City Council and the South Australian Water Corporation in 2013, 2014 and 2017.

The Turnbull Government senator, who is on a $203,000 salary, was ordered by local court magistrates to pay $9,731 in seven unpaid bills, related to two investment properties in Adelaide and one in regional Whyalla.

One unpaid council bill went to court just three weeks before she was sworn in last year as a senator, and another bill was taken to a magistrate four months after she became a member of Parliament.  

The backbencher, who owns four houses in South Australia with her husband William, had failed to pay $8,359 worth council rates and $1,372 in water bills.

On her pecuniary interest register, Senator Gichuhi declares she is the owner of investment properties in the Adelaide suburbs of Dernancourt and Gilles Plains, along with another home in the steelworks city of Whyalla.

The senator and mother-of-three, who moved to Australia from Kenya in 1999, received five arrears from the Port of Adelaide Enfield Council and one from Whyalla City Council, in areas where she owns three investment properties.

According to her Statement of Registerable Interests the senator in partnership with her husband owns 6 residential properties in South Australia and 3 properties in Kenya.

She appears to receive rental income on a number of these properties. 

The Advertiser, 21 June 2018, p.6:

Senator Gichuhi, already under pressure after spending thousands of taxpayer dollars flying her family to Canberra, was provided with staff, office space, a car, driver and entertainment by one of Kenya’s richest men. The SA senator spoke at events organised by Equity Bank and its wealthy chief executive James Mwangi.

Disclosure documents lodged earlier this year show Dr Mwangi provided Senator Gichuhi with “a car and a driver … to attend various events and functions”.

“Dr Mwangi also provided office facilities, refreshments and access to his staff to enable me to prepare speeches for Nairobi University and other functions,” the document reads.

Dr Mwangi, who is worth $230 million, invited Senator Gichuhi to speak at Equity Bank events including on January 4, where she addressed the bank’s Wings To Fly scholars….

Disclosures show Senator Gichuhi received free accommodation from another wealthy Kenyan businessman, Linus Gitahi, who she described as her “long-term friend”.

The Advertiser, 19 June 2018, p.5:

South Australian senator Lucy Gichuhi billed taxpayers more than $4500 to fly six family travellers to Canberra during the week she was sworn into Federal Parliament prompting calls for a tightening of expenses.

According to parliamentary records, Senator Gichuhi claimed three return flights from Adelaide, two from Darwin and a one-way flight from Sydney taken during the second week of May last year.

She has previously defended her decision to accept free accommodation from the High Commission of Kenya in Canberra for her family to attend her swearing-in on May 9 last year 2017, because they struggled to find accommodation.

Junkee, 19 June 2018:

Gichuhi billed taxpayers $2139 for two return flights from Darwin to Adelaide, which were used to fly family members to her birthday party in October last year. She has since agreed to pay that cost back in full, saying it was “an administrative error involving misunderstanding of travel rules”.

And while we’re on the point of corrections, it wasn’t even her 50th birthday party — Gichuhi is 55. She actually titled the birthday party her “50 plus GST” birthday, the omitted 5 years being the GST. In the speech she gave at the event, which is inexplicably available on her website, she told guests that “I have now also taught you to deduct 10 percent off your own age — if you want to!”….

Gichuhi has also come under fire for billing taxpayers around $12,000 for a number of trips to Sydney, which she listed as “electorate business”, despite her electorate actually being in South Australia.

The American Resistance has many faces and these are just three of them (21)

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), media release, 20 March 2018:

Washington—A federal judge today granted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) summary judgement in its landmark case against the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the second time the Court has ruled against the FEC for dismissing CREW’s complaint against a dark money group that spent millions in federal elections.

Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in September 2016 that the FEC acted “contrary to law” by dismissing a complaint against American Action Network (AAN), which spent millions on ads without revealing its donors, finding that the FEC’s analysis “blinks reality” and returning the case to the FEC to correct its error. Nevertheless, the three Republican commissioners once again blocked action against the organization, leading Judge Cooper today to correct the commissioners on their continued failure to follow the law.

This decision will have a major impact on disclosure by dark money groups, as the FEC can no longer ignore organizations’ spending on ads that air just before an election that try to hide their political purposes behind a sham “call” for viewers to contact their representatives about legislation.

“This decision marks a major victory not just for CREW but for believers in an open and transparent political process,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said. “We hope to see a major change in the way the FEC approaches investigations of nonprofit organizations engaged in politics.”

The case revolves around clearly political ads aired by AAN which the FEC decided were not meant to influence an election. The judge wrote in the first decision that “it blinks reality to conclude that many of the ads considered by the Commissioners in this case were not designed to influence the election or defeat of a particular candidate.” Yet the FEC still failed to act. The judge wrote in today’s decision, “The controlling Commissioners did not find that this ad (nor any others mentioning healthcare) had an election-related purpose…Seriously?”

“It’s a shame we have to keep taking the FEC to court to make it do its job,” Bookbinder said. “Unfortunately, they have given us no other choice. If they do not want to keep losing in court, they should start enforcing the law.”

Click here to read the decision

Guns are not a badge of power or masculinity - they are a weapon of mindless violence in the hands of idiots

https://youtu.be/WxwPcUh97oc

Wearing your dark heart on your car and gun

Facebook Inc remains part of the problem

Tin-eared social media giant Facebook Inc demonstrates once again that it is part of the problem and not part of the solution, as it promotes toxic gun culture at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference and fails to come to grips with its part in spreading conspiracy theories and "fake news".

Gizmondo, 25 February 2018:

Facebook has pulled a demo of Oculus Rift's VR shooter Bullet Train from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland amid concerns over gun violence, Variety reported earlier.

It doesn't appear to have been Bullet Train's violent content that prompted the withdrawal per se, but rather that CPAC draws lots of gun rights advocates right at the same time those same National Rifle Association types are drawing a massive wave of criticism in the wake of another school massacre in Parkland, Florida this month.

A number of companies have cut ties with the NRA, like software firm Symantec, which decided to pull discounts for the pro-gun group's members this week. A running New York Times tally of others to do so includes banks, airlines, automotive rentals and services, insurance companies, and a home security company.

As the Times noted on Friday, boycott campaigns tend to fade over time but this time the pressure has built quickly, buoyed by a number of Parkland survivors speaking out on social media and leaving some corporations with no middle ground to recede to.

Facebook is at CPAC and they have a VR shooting game pic.twitter.com/wmV23jezpN

— Sean Morrow (@snmrrw) February 23, 2018

A demo clip of Bullet Train hosted on the Oculus Rift website shows that at least one level in the game involves the player fighting through waves of "resistance forces" in a fairly generic rail station setting. It does not appear to be particularly bloody, though video of CPAC attendees using the game's motion-tracking controls in a vague pantomime of actual shooting probably did not help, either.

In a statement to Variety, Facebook virtual reality VP Hugo Barra said:

There is a standard set of experiences included in the Oculus demos we feature at public events. A few of the action games can include violence. In light of the recent events in Florida and out of respect for the victims and their families, we have removed them from this demo. We regret that we failed to do so in the first place.

Yet the optics of the Oculus Rift demo are probably not the most important issue Facebook should be worried about right now.

Facebook itself has also come under fire for the rapid spread of conspiracy theories about the Parkland shooting, which as CNN noted migrate from internet underbellies like 4chan onto mainstream social media sites via "conservative pages, alt-right personalities, nationalist blogs and far-right pundits." Posts on Facebook promoting the idiotic smear that survivors speaking out against guns were "crisis actors," i.e. some hazily defined variety of professional propagandists paid off to promote gun control, went far and wide; the social media giant repeatedly declined to discuss how it was enforcing violations of its community guidelines against offenders when asked by CNN.

Per the New York Times, it is still really, really easy to find hundreds of posts claiming the shooting was part of a "deep state" black flag operation or the like using Facebook's built-in search option, which kind of calls into question the company's sincerity:

On Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, searches for the hashtag #crisisactor, which accused the Parkland survivors of being actors, turned up hundreds of posts perpetuating the falsehood (though some also criticised the conspiracy theory). Many of the posts had been tweaked ever so slightly -- for example, videos had been renamed #propaganda rather than #hoax -- to evade automated detection.

The spread of the theories on Facebook has also caused some in the tech media to question whether the long-maligned and ill-defined "trending" metric should be retired. Users who post conspiracy theories often rabidly engage with others promoting similar ideas, which in numerous instances means the posts are promoted right to the top of Facebook and other sites like YouTube.

The Charlottesville incidents to which US President Donald J. Trump gives tacit support - WARNING: violent and disturbing images

https://youtu.be/P54sP0Nlngg

The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 August 2017:

He [President Trump] argued that both sides had been guilty of violence, he noted that the white supremacists indeed had a permit to protest, but the "other group" did not. He insisted that both sides had "bad people" and "very fine people" and he drew an equivalency between George Washington, who help create the United States after the American Revolutionary War that ended in 1783, and General Robert E. Lee, who led the secessionist armies that killed more American troops than any other foe in the defence of slavery nearly a century later.

The political and media response afterwards was immediate and shocked. Again Republican leaders were forced to come out to rebuke and distance themselves from their ostensible leader. In a long Twitter statement Marco Rubio declared, "Mr President, you can't allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame. They support idea which cost nation & world so much pain."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I suspect that the reaction to "Unite The Right Rally" marches in Charlottesville is not what Neo-Nazi, Klu Klux Klan and other hate groups were expecting

From 11 to 12 August 2017 extreme right wing groups gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia USA to participate in a two-day rally. Counter protesters also gathered over that same time period.

By the evening of 12 August two police officers and one counter protester were dead and at least twenty counter protesters were wounded.

Unite The Right march participant……

"We are stepping off the Internet in a big way. For instance last night at the Torch Log there were hundreds and hundreds of us. People realised they are not atomised individuals, they are part of a larger whole. Because we have been spreading our memes, we have been organising on the Internet and now they are coming out and now as you can see today we greatly outnumbered the anti-white, anti-American filth and at some point we will have enough power that we will clear them from the streets forever. That which is degenerate in white countries will be removed. We are starting to slowly unveil a little bit of our power level – you ain't seen nothin yet." [Robert "Azzmador" Ray, feature writer at The Daily Stormer, video, 12 August 2017]

Reaction to the white supremacist violence……

The white supremacist who helped lead the Charlottesville rally has been banned from Facebook

Facebook has banned the Facebook and Instagram accounts of a white nationalist who attended the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that ended in deadly violence.

Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja told the Associated Press on Wednesday that the profile pages of Christopher Cantwell have been removed as well as a page connected to his podcast..

The Daily Caller Removes 'Unite the Right' Organizer Jason Kessler's Bylines From Web Site

As of 14 August 2017, Daily Caller —  a conservative web site with a twin nonprofit organization — has scrubbed its site of articles by Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who was an organizer of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia the weekend before. 

Daily Stormer jumps to dark web while Reddit and Facebook ban hate groups

GoDaddy – the internet domain registrar and web hosting service – and Google cancelled the Daily Stormer's domain name registration on Sunday, saying they prohibit clients from using their sites to incite violence. The Daily Stormer helped organise the violent neo-Nazi gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday at which a civil rights activist died.

Twitter is joining its fellow tech companies in clamping down on the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website

On Twitter, the Daily Stormer's feed is no longer visible; instead, the page on Wednesday afternoon reflects its account has been "suspended." A spokesperson for Twitter said the company could not comment on individual users, but added: "The Twitter Rules prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct, and multiple account abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies."

Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again.

US companies crack down on key services for hate groups

US companies are blocking hate groups from key services such as payments, cyber security defences and social media sites after the violence in Charlottesville, despite questions over the consequences for freedom of speech. Leading payment and credit card groups MasterCard, American Express, Discover Financial Services and Visa have joined Silicon Valley companies Twitter and Cloudflare to become the latest corporations to try to block neo-Nazis' access to funds and the internet. Several of the payments companies added they did not ban the use of their services because the customers expressed offensive views — but because they violated their terms of service or incited violence.

Trump Dissolves Business Advisory Councils as CEOs Quit

Most leaders on the councils thought Trump's statement on Monday, in which he condemned the hate groups by name, was sufficient. But they were furious and disgusted with Trump's follow-up remarks on Tuesday, according to the offices of two CEOs.

By Tuesday night, at least nine members decided to drop out individually, and reached out to Schwarzman, who then proposed dismantling the council entirely.

A dozen members of that strategy and policy council participated in a conference call Wednesday, during which they all agreed to dissolve the group, the people close to the decision said. Schwarzman then notified the White House. And after that, Trump tweeted that he was "ending both" advisory councils. The business leaders had expected that Trump would portray the developments as his own decision, the sources said

Matt Talhelm‏ @MattTalhelm

#BREAKING: #Cville car suspect, #UniteTheRight rally organizer, & alt-right leaders face $3M lawsuit from 2 ppl injured in car attack

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