'He understands policy'

'No one' had won

'Boy, that just looks like a different Trump'

Ahh ... the marlin. One of God's greatest creations

'I witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen'

'We heard a big thump and the tree fell on the house'

'I'm a wartime speaker, in a real sense'

It’s not just members of Congress and other politicians or TV personalities speaking at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. So-called everyday Americans are taking the big stage in the speaker lineup too. Peruvian immigrant Vanessa Fuara told former President Donald Trump and delegates gathered in the convention hall Monday night about her experience as a legal immigrant and inflation’s impact on America’s mothers. Born in Peru, Fuara said she moved to the U.S. with her family when she was 9 years old.  “Like millions of legal immigrants, my family didn’t begin our pursuit of the American dream by breaking the law: We respected America, and we wanted to earn our citizenship,” Fuara said.  At 18, Fuara said, she achieved one of her greatest aspirations when she became a U.S. citizen. When she asked her father what political party she should join, Fuara said he replied, “We’re Hispanics. We vote Democrat.”  But the more she learned, Fuara recalled, she noticed that her values didn’t align with the Democratic Party.  She said she believes that the family is “the most important institution,” the U.S. Constitution “is the greatest document in history,” and every human “born and unborn is made in the image of God.”  As manager of partnerships and coalitions at the organization Restoration of America, a group dedicated to teaching Americans about issues such as abortion and the sanctity of life, Fuara said, she has “had the honor of meeting thousands of moms since Biden took office.”  She said she hears one dominant message from mothers of various backgrounds: “The cost of living is making it harder to meet basic needs.”  Mothers are “reaching down to the bottom shelf just to save 25 cents,” she said, and “grandmothers who should be enjoying their golden years are working again to barely make ends meet.” These days America feels more like she is back in Latin America, Fuara said.  “Under the Biden-Harris agenda, we’re no longer living, we’re surviving,” she said.  But under Trump, Hispanic unemployment hit record lows and income reached a record high, she said.  Fuara ended her speech by addressing “fellow Hispanic Americans” as well as “all Americans,” saying that “if you believe in faith, family, freedom, [and] financial stability,” they should join her in voting for Trump. The post ‘Feels Like I’m Back in Latin America,’ Peruvian Immigrant Tells GOP Convention Delegates appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Yet more “innovative” – and comprehensive – ways in which US taxpayer-funded groups “communicated” with Big Tech behind major social media are coming to light. This one concerns the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub. Twitter Files’ Matt Taibbi’s Substack project Racket News reports that the response to their FOIA requests unveiled what is referred to as “a tight-knit relationship between university professors, federal law enforcement, and the news media.” The emails that went back and forth between the founders of the Clemson Hub and Twitter and Facebook (between July 2019 and September 2022) show that the focus was not only on removing content and accounts but also on making sure there was cooperation with politically aligned media like CNN (one of Twitter’s emails said this was already happening in the form of “data sharing”). And while these social and legacy media are private, “disinformation research” done at Clemson was sponsored by South Carolina Research Authority – which is funded by taxpayer money. In October 2022, the National Science Foundation awarded (or rewarded?) Clemson’s Hub with a $5 million grant. But the roundabout ties with the government don’t stop there: The documents also reveal that the professors behind the Clemson Hub were “coordinating” not only with CNN, but also federal law enforcement, and, with Graphika. Racket News writes that the emails they got via FOIA show Clemson was receiving “help with resources” from law enforcement. As for Graphika – this social media analytics firm says it is “the most trusted provider of intelligence” meant to protect the integrity of global elections, counter foreign malign influence, detect coordinated harassment and incitement to violence, and so on. One entity that certainly trusted Graphika – to flag online speech for censorship, that is – is the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), among others of similar provenance. The House Judiciary Committee looking into online media space manipulations ahead of the 2020 presidential ballot established that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had its hand in the setting up of Stanford and Washington universities’ scheme EIP – which then allegedly went on to collude with DHS’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Newly Released Emails Reveal Coordination Between Clemson University Media Forensics Hub and Social Media Giants appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Earlier in the year, Google filed an application to patent new methods, systems, and media for what the giant calls “identifying videos containing objectionable content” that are uploaded to a social site or video service. For example, YouTube – though the filing doesn’t explicitly name this platform. The patent application, which has just been published this month, is somewhat different from other automated “methods and systems” Google and other giants, notably Microsoft, already have to power their censorship apparatus; with this one, the focus is more on how AI can be added to the mix. More and more often, various countries are introducing censorship laws where the speed at which content is removed or accounts blocked is a major requirement made of social media companies. Google could have this in mind when the patent’s purpose is said to be to improve on detecting objectionable content quickly, “for potential removal.” No surprise here, but what should be the key question – namely, what is considered as “objectionable content” – is less of a definition and more a list that can be further expanded, variously interpreted, etc., and the list includes such items as violence, pornography, objectionable language, animal abuse, and then the cherry on top – “and/or any other type of objectionable content.” The filing details how Google’s new system works, and we equally unsurprisingly learn that AI here means machine learning (ML) and neural networks. This technology is supposed to mimic the human brain but comes down to a series of equations, differentiated from ordinary algorithms by “learning” about what an image (or a video in this case) is, pixel by pixel. It seems from the description of the process we are looking at a type of generative adversarial network (GAN) system – two neural networks “competing” while “learning.” Google says it creates “embeddings” from content or even metadata and compares that to other known objectionable content (both “float” in two separate “multi-dimensional spaces” that contain other “embeddings”). That’s one way of saying, “huge data sets are needed here.” Some observers see this and other similar efforts to produce “AI-based” censorship technology as logical, given the volume of content the platforms deal with. But then there are all sorts of problems, including both false positives and negatives in the never-ending hunt for “disinformation” and “harms.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google Plans New Content-Scanning Censorship Tech appeared first on Reclaim The Net.