PayPal Bans Alex Jones And InfoWars For "Promoting Hate"

Following in the footsteps of corporate giants Apple, Facebook, Google and Spotify, on Friday PayPal said it was is terminating its relationship with Alex Jones and his website, Infowars. In a statement, PayPal said that after an extensive review of Infowars and its related sites the company "found instances that promoted hate or discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions, which run counter to our core value of inclusion" although it declined to cite specific examples of Infowars’s problematic behavior. After PayPal notified Infowars of its decision on Thursday, the site accused PayPal in a blog post of a "political ploy designed to financially sabotage an influential media outlet." It added that PayPal had given it 10 days to find a new payment platform, after which PayPal’s services would no longer function. After learning of the imminent ban, Infowars supporters began urging the site to accept bitcoin.

PayPal's decision is only the latest crackdown against the controversial blog: last month, Jones’s podcasts were removed from iTunes after Apple said it did not tolerate hate speech. YouTube then took similar enforcement steps against Infowars, saying Jones had “repeatedly” violated its terms of service, according to the WaPo. And while Twitter initially resisted banning Jones, after a few days of pressure from the media and its peers, it too removed him from its platform earlier this month with a permanent suspension. There may have been another reason: Twitter’s decision to ban Infowars came hours after Jones appeared at a high-profile congressional hearing involving Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Afterward, Jones tried to confront Dorsey as he was exiting the Senate office building where the hearing was held. PayPal’s decision to remove Jones hits him where it will probably hurt his business the most: his wallet. Will the PayPal ban hurt InfoWars? According to WaPo, "last month, roughly 1.15 million visitors logged onto Jones’s online storefront, Infowarsstore.com, Jonathan Albright, the Tow Center’s research director, told The Post’s Craig Timberg in a recent interview. Of those, more than 60 percent went to PayPal after visiting his digital shop, implying that Jones is effective at converting visitors into paying customers. As for whether the recent publicity has hurt the website's traffic, for now - at least - all the bans appear to be backfiring.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-21/paypal-bans-alex-jones-and-infowars-discriminatory-intolerance

>>3126949

Fake guys…no mention of it anywhere…

New Q

>>3127060

^^^^^^^^^^^^ New Q

Google Suppresses Memo Revealing Plans to Closely Track Search Users in China

Google bosses have forced employees to delete a confidential memo circulating inside the company that revealed explosive details about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China, The Intercept has learned. The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location — and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have “unilateral access” to the data. The memo was shared earlier this month among a group of Google employees who have been organizing internal protests over the censored search system, which has been designed to remove content that China’s authoritarian Communist Party regime views as sensitive, such as information about democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. According to three sources familiar with the incident, Google leadership discovered the memo and were furious that secret details about the China censorship were being passed between employees who were not supposed to have any knowledge about it. Subsequently, Google human resources personnel emailed employees who were believed to have accessed or saved copies of the memo and ordered them to immediately delete it from their computers. Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained “pixel trackers” that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.

The Dragonfly memo reveals that a prototype of the censored search engine was being developed as an app for both Android and iOS devices, and would force users to sign in so they could use the service. The memo confirms, as The Intercept first reported last week, that users’ searches would be associated with their personal phone number. The memo adds that Chinese users’ movements would also be stored, along with the IP address of their device and links they clicked on. It accuses developers working on the project of creating “spying tools” for the Chinese government to monitor its citizens. People’s search histories, location information, and other private data would be sent out of China to a database in Taiwan, the memo states. But the data would also be provided to employees of a Chinese company who would be granted “unilateral access” to the system. To launch the censored search engine, Google set up a “joint venture” partnership with an unnamed Chinese company. The search engine will “blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all when people enter certain words or phrases, according to documents seen by The Intercept. Blacklisted search terms on a prototype of the search engine include “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize” in Mandarin, said sources familiar with the project. According to the memo, aside from being able to access users’ search data, the Chinese partner company could add to the censorship blacklists: It would be able to “selectively edit search result pages … unilaterally, and with few controls seemingly in place.”

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-revealing-plans-to-closely-track-search-users-in-china/