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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) posted a thread on X Monday he titled The Amazon Files, revealing emails he said show the tech company caved to pressure from the Biden administration to censor books.

The emails sent from the Biden administration to Amazon and internal messages from the company showed that on the same day that Amazon met with the White House in March 2021, the company enabl[ed] Do Not Promote for books that expressed hesitancy about the COVID vaccines, Jordan said.

According to emails the White House sent to Amazon nearly three years ago, then-senior White House advisor Andy Slavitt who at the same time was pressuring Facebook to suppress vaccine-related stories asked who he could talk to at the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation at Amazon. Slavitt added in his email that a search for vaccines under books on Amazon yielded concerning results.

How did the Biden White House conclude that there was propaganda and misinformation in books sold in Amazons bookstore? The White House ran keyword searches for controversial topics, such as vaccine, and emailed Amazon when it didnt like how the search results appeared, Jordan said.

In response to the Biden administrations request, Amazon appeared to discuss taking action but held off on doing a manual intervention because the companys PR team was afraid such a move would be too visible and would be picked up by news outlets, such as Fox News.

Why was the Biden White House so upset with Amazon? Jordan asked. Because Amazon believed retailers are different than social media communities & provided their customers with access to a variety of viewpoints. For the Biden Admin, letting Americans think for themselves was unacceptable.

Jordan wrote that on March 9, 2021, a week after the initial email, the White House met with Amazon. Internal documents revealed that one of Amazons main questions for the administration was, Is the Admin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (both)? In the internal documents revealed by Jordan, Amazon also admitted that it was feeling pressure from the White House as the company also anticipated a negative story published by BuzzFeed on books sold on Amazon related to vaccine misinformation.

On the same day as its meeting with the White House, Amazon said in internal discussions that it enabled its Do Not Promote for books that questioned the efficacy of the COVID vaccines, and the tech giant also considered other ways to reduce the visibility of certain books that the Biden White House disliked, Jordan said.

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Thats right. Amazon caved to the pressure from the Biden White House to censor speech, the judiciary committee chairman added.

Jordan concluded the thread by saying that the Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government are investigating the Biden administrations effort to pressure Amazon to enforce more censorship.

The congressmans findings add yet another company to the list of tech giants pressured by the Biden administration to censor vaccine-related information. Last summer, Jordan began releasing what he called the Facebook Files, saying the Biden administration pressured Facebook to stifle speech the White House didnt like, including limiting The Daily Wires reach on the platform. Then in December, The Daily Wire reported that YouTube went along with the White Houses censorship requests before Facebook was pressured to follow suit, according to documents shared with Jordan.

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Jim Jordan Reveals Emails, Accuses WH Of Pressuring Amazon 'To Censor Books': 'Letting Americans Think For ... - The Daily Wire

The Beijing skyline.Construction Photography/Avalon / Contributor

A social-media account belonging to China's US Embassy is being flooded by angry investors.

Thousands have commented about the dire state of the stock market on a post about giraffes.

Some of the comments have reportedly been deleted, while others used sarcasm to deter censorship.

Chinese investors, angry about the state of their country's economy, are using an unlikely forum to vent their frustrations: A post about giraffes on the US Embassy's Weibo account.

More than 165,400 comments have flooded the post on Weibo, one of China's largest social-media platforms, which details how scientists in Africa used AI and GPS to track and protect wild giraffes.

Commenters have taken the opportunity to share unrelated complaints about China's flailing economy in the hope that their comments will not be deleted by Chinese censors.

China's blue-chip CSI300 Index fell 6.3% last month to a five-year low after a series of government measures failed to confidence among investors, according to Reuters.

Bloomberg reported that China and Hong Kong's stock markets accumulated $7 trillion in losses since their 2021 peaks.

The Weibo account of the US embassy in China "has become the Wailing Wall of Chinese retail equity investors", one user wrote on the post, according to Reuters.

Many of the comments were later deleted, CNN reported. The situation shows how the government's censorship and its citizens' efforts to avoid being silenced has reached new heights.

The US Embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"The US government, please help Chinese stock investors," one person wrote in a repost of the Weibo article, according to CNN.

Other Weibo users commented that the stock market is a "casino" and an "execution ground," Bloomberg reported.

"Anger has reached an extreme level," another Weibo user said, according to Bloomberg.

Some commenters used humor and sarcasm to get around the country's strict social media restrictions.

"Arise! All giraffes who refuse to be slaves," one person wrote, referencing the line in China's national anthem: "Arise! All who refuse to be slaves," according to CNN.

Another person commented: "The entire giraffe community is filled with optimism," according to CNN. The comment appeared to reference an article published in the Chinese state-owned People's Daily newspaper about the visit of a German communist politician with the headline: "The whole country is filled with optimism."

China has one of the world's most censored media industries, with digital news and social media use heavily restricted throughout the country.

Some social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, are prohibited and the government monitors social media platforms that are allowed, such as Weibo.

The apparent censorship matters it appears to be part of a government campaign to silence those critical of the country's financial state. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that authorities deleted multiple Chinese online news articles containing critical coverage of the country's economy.

Writing in its official WeChat account, China's Ministry of State Security deterred citizens from believing the "false narratives" about the trajectory of China, according to the NYT report. Meanwhile, top officials have publicly spoken about the importance of elevating the "bright prospects of China's economy," according to the Journal.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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Angry Chinese people are using a US embassy social-media page to dodge censors and vent about its slumping ... - Yahoo News

Chinas top intelligence agency issued an ominous warning last month about an emerging threat to the countrys national security: Chinese people who criticize the economy.

In a series of posts on its official WeChat account, the Ministry of State Security implored citizens to grasp President Xi Jinpings economic vision and not be swayed by those who sought to denigrate Chinas economy through false narratives. To combat this risk, the ministry said, security agencies will focus on strengthening economic propaganda and public opinion guidance.

China is intensifying its crackdown while struggling to reclaim the dynamism and rapid economic growth of the past. Beijing has censored and tried to intimidate renowned economists, financial analysts, investment banks and social media influencers for bearish assessments of the economy and the governments policies. In addition, news articles about people experiencing financial struggles or the poor living standards for migrant workers are being removed.

China has continued to offer a rosy outlook for the economy, noting that it beat its forecast for economic growth of 5 percent last year without resorting to risky, expensive stimulus measures. Beyond the numbers, however, its financial industry is struggling to contain enormous amounts of local government debt, its stock market is reeling and its property sector is in crisis. China Evergrande, the high-flying developer felled by over $300 billion in debt, was ordered into liquidation on Monday.

The new information campaign is wider in scope than the usual work of the governments censors, who have always closely monitored online chatter about the economy. Their efforts now extend to mainstream economic commentary that was permitted in the past. The involvement of security agencies also underscores the ways in which business and economic interests fall under Mr. Xis increasingly expansive view of what constitutes a threat to national security.

In November, the state security ministry, calling itself staunch guardians of financial security, said other countries used finance as a weapon in geopolitical games.

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How China Censors Critics of the Economy - The New York Times

Even so, a little more than two weeks after publishing its investigation into Appin Technology, on December 5, Reuters complied with the Indian court's injunction, removing its story. Soon, in a kind of domino effect of censorship, others began to take down their own reports about Appin Technology after receiving legal threats based on the same injunction. SentinelOne, the cybersecurity firm that had helped Reuters in its investigation, removed its research on an Appin Technology subsidiarys alleged hacking from its website. The Internet Archive deleted its copy of the Reuters article. The legal news site Lawfare and cybersecurity news podcast Risky Biz both published analyses based on the article; Risky Biz took its podcast episode down, and Lawfare overwrote every part of its piece that referred to Appin Technology with Xs. WIRED, too, removed a summary of Reuters' article in a news roundup after receiving Appin Training Centers' threat.

Aside from the injunction that Appin Training Centers has used to demand publishers censor their stories, Appin cofounder Rajat Khare has separately sent legal threats to another collection of news outlets based on a court order he obtained in Switzerland. Two Swiss publications have publicly noted that they responded to court orders by removing Khares name from stories about alleged hacking. Others have removed Khares name or removed the articles altogether without a public explanation, including the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the UKs Sunday Times, several Swiss and French news outlets, and eight Indian ones.

This is an organization throwing everything against the wall, trying to make as many allegations in as many venues as possible in the hopes that something, somewhere sticks, says one person at a media outlet that has received multiple legal threats from people connected to Appin Technology, who declined to be named due to the legal risks of speaking out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. Unfortunately, in India, its worked.

Even before the EFF, Techdirt, MuckRock, and DDoSecrets began to push back against that censorship, some had immediately resisted it. The New Yorker, for instance, had mentioned a subsidiary of Appin Technology and Rajat Khare in a feature about India's hacker-for-hire industry in June of last year. It was sued by Appin Training Centers, but has kept its piece online while the lawsuit proceeds. (The New Yorker and WIRED are both published by Cond Nast.) Ronald Deibert, a well-known security researcher and founder of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, a group that focuses on exposing hackers who target members of civil society, had also mentioned Appin Technology in a blog post. Deibert received and refused Appin Training Centers' takedown threat, posting a screenshot of its email to his X feed in December along with his response: seven middle-finger emojis.

As the backlash to the censorship of reporting on Appin Technology's alleged hacking snowballs, however, it may now be going beyond a few cases where Appin Training Centers and Rajat Khares censorship attempts have failed, says Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, who has written about the censorship campaign. Instead, it may be backfiring, he says, particularly for Appin Technology cofounder Rajat Khare. It does seem like a sort of dubious strategy to be stirring this up now, and I do wonder if he is starting to regret that given the coverage it's getting, says Stern. You could easily see that it'll do more reputational harm than good for Khare and for Appin.

MuckRock's Morisy says that attention is exactly the intention of his move, along with Techdirt and the EFF, to put a spotlight on the legal threats they've received. Its leveraging the Streisand effect to an extent. But also just finding ways to push back, says Morisy. There needs to be a cost for groups that are trying to silence journalists.

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A Startup Allegedly 'Hacked the World.' Then Came the Censorshipand Now the Backlash - WIRED

The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, also known as the Oil Fund, had a good year. The fund that is managed by the Norwegian Central Bank on behalf of the countrys Ministry of Finance in 2023 returned 16,1 percent, equivalent to 2,222 billion kroner (195 billion), CEO Nicolai Tangen of Norges Bank Investment Management announced this week.

As of 31st of December 2023, the fund had a value of 15,765 billion kroner (1,383 billion), of which 70,9 percent was invested in equities. The Oil Fund now holds about 1,5% of all of the worlds listed companies. It is the worlds largest single sovereign wealth fund.

Despite high inflation and geopolitical turmoil, the equity market in 2023 was very strong, compared to a weak year in 2022, Tangen said.

To a great extent, that turmoil is triggered by Russia and its war against Ukraine. Still, the Norwegian government fund continues to own a significant part of Russias leading companies. According to the list of holdings, there are 52 Russian companies in the portfolio.

The most valuable holdings are in the field of oil and gas, and especially the companies Gazprom and Lukoil, worth respectively 232 million NOK and 288 million NOK. The Fund also owns a 0,72 percent stake in Sberbank that has a value of 326 million NOK.

The Fund also owns more than one percent of companies such as Phosagro, Segezha Group, Rosseti, Bank St Petersburg PJSC and more. On the list are also companies sanctioned by the USA and EU, such as Sberbank and diamond producer Alrosa.

In addition, the Norwegians owns shares in several of the companies actively exploited by the Kremlin to censor and streamline public opinion.

The Oil Fund owns 0.47 percent of VK Holding, the technology company that operates social media vKontakte (VK). The social media now has more than 650 million accounts and is one of the most popular websites in Russia. In late 2021, Russian state-owned bank Gazprombankand insurance company Sogar acquired 57,3 percent of the VK shares and consequently secured full control over the company.

Few years earlier, founder and CEO Pavel Durov had been forced out of the company, reportedly following his refusal to hand over personal details of users to the FSB and his refusal to shut down a VK group dedicated to anti-corruption activistAleksei Navalny.

Over the last few years, the VK has blocked hundreds of accounts operated by independent journalists, civil society activists and other Kremlin critics. In 2022, the company blocked the pages of Aleksei Navalny, Ilya Yashin, as well Mikhail Khodorkovsky and media companies Meduza, MediaZona, Dozhd, Echo Moscow, Current Time and others.

On the list of ownership is also Yandex, the Russian tech company that is most known for its internet search engine. The Oil Fund owns 0,96 percent of company that is considered Russias biggest technology company.

One of the founders of Yandex was Arkady Volozh, a man who in 2017 showed Vladimir Putin around in the fancy downtown Moscow offices, but who five years later emigrated to Israel following war and Kremlin crackdown.

According to Meduza, the tech company was in 2023 taken over by a group of Kremlin-loyal oligarchs. It is now controlled by Vladimir Potanins Interros, Aleksei Mordashovs Severstal, Vagit Alekperovs Lukoil and bank VTB.

The Norwegian Oil Fund also owns minor shares in telecommunications companies MTS and Rostelecom.

The latter is Russias biggest state telecom company. Recently, the company has been busy developing an electronic distant voting system that is to be applied in the upcoming Russian presidential elections, company CEO Mikhail Oseevsky told Putin in a meeting in June 2023.

The most valuable Russian holding of the Norwegian Fund is Sberbank. The Norwegians own 0,72 percent of the company that is Russias biggest bank and one of the countrys major technology developers.

Sberbank is actively working in a wide field of tech development, including in artificial intelligence. When Putin visited the Rossiya exhibition on the 1st of February this year, he had a stop at Sberbanks stand.

In his meeting with Sberbank CEO German Gref in March 2023, Putin revealed that he is in constant contact with the Sberbank leader.

The 52 Russian holdings total only a tiny share of the Norwegian Oil Fund. Whereas the assets had a value of more than 31 billion NOK (2,72 billion) in 2019, they were in 2023 worth less than 1,5 billion NOK (131 million).

But the symbolic effect and moral aspect of holding stakes in Russias war economy and the system of repression, propaganda and censorship is significant.

The Barents Observer has approached the press service of the Norges Bank Investment Management for a comment, but by the time of publishing this article the bank has not responded to questions about why the Fund still has holdings in 52 Russian companies and whether there are plans to get rid of the ownership.

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Norway owns a part of Putin's propaganda and censorship machine - The Independent Barents Observer