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Sheesh….of course there was one. The first response was there was no imminent danger but U.S. personnel were to take all precautions and avoid crowded spaces.
Now, the truth comes out.
Police secure roads around U.S. Embassy in Ankara on Monday. Umit Bektas / Reuters
Turkish police foiled a planned Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) attack on the U.S. Embassy in Ankara on March 5, detaining suspects in the capital Ankara and the Black Sea province of Samsun.
The detentions came after the Ankara Governor’s Office stated late on March 4 that extra security measures had been taken in the city upon intelligence that “terrorist actions” could take place in areas where U.S. citizens are located.
“Upon intelligence coming to our units from U.S. sources that terrorist actions could be undertaken targeting the U.S. Embassy and where U.S. citizens are staying, security measures have been reviewed and extra measures have been taken,” the Governor’s Office said.
The U.S. Embassy in Turkey announced that it has suspended operations on March 5 and 6 due to an unspecified security threat.
A statement posted on the embassy’s website on March 4 urged U.S. citizens to avoid the embassy in Ankara and large crowds, as well as to “keep a low profile.”
The statement said the embassy will be closed “due to a security threat. The Embassy will announce its reopening, once it resumes services.” It did not give details about the threat.
On March 5, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ said U.S. consulates in Turkey were “operating as normal.”
Four Iraqis detained in Samsun on charges of plotting attack
Meanwhile, four Iraqi nationals were detained in Samsun by the National Intelligence Agency (MİT) and local anti-terror authorities in an operation against ISIL, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on March 5.
Several digital documents were seized in the operation, the agency reported.
The suspects detained on charges of plotting an attack against the U.S. Embassy in Ankara were taken to the police station for formal legal proceedings.
Police detain 12 in Ankara over ISIL links
In addition, the Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office said police have detained 12 suspected ISIL militants in Ankara and are searching for eight others.
A statement from the prosecutor’s office said the suspects were detained in a police operation on March 5. It added that all the suspects are foreigners but did not provide detail on their nationalities.
According to the statement, the detained suspects are accused of trying to recruit members for ISIL and were “in contact with people in conflict zones.”
In 2013, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive in front of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. He killed himself and one Turkish security guard on duty. Turkish officials blamed the attack on domestic leftists.
***
(Reuters) – Turkish police arrested 12 people in Ankara in an investigation targeting Islamic State jihadists, state-run Anadolu news agency said on Monday, hours after the U.S. embassy there said it would remain closed for the day due to a security threat.
The 12 suspects were among 20 people for whom detention warrants were issued by the Ankara state prosecutors’ office, Anadolu said. It said they were foreign citizens and had been seeking to recruit new members to the group.
Turkish authorities regularly detain Islamic State suspects and it was not clear whether there was any connection between the arrests and the U.S. embassy move. Anadolu said the police operation was“planned previously”.
On Sunday evening, the U.S. embassy in Ankara said it would be closed to the public on Monday due to a security threat and only emergency services will be provided.
The Ankara governor’s office said additional security measures were taken after intelligence from U.S. sources suggested there might be an attack targeting the U.S. embassy or places U.S. citizens were staying.
Turkish police increased operations against Islamic State at the end of 2017 before the first anniversary of a New Year gun attack on an Istanbul nightclub in which 39 people were killed.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for that shooting, one of a series of attacks believed to have been carried out by the jihadists in Turkey in recent years.
Except for the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley that is.
Amid growing food insecurity and rising malnutrition among children on the back of a protracted economic crisis in Venezuela, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Friday called on all actors for rapid and coordinated assistance efforts to reach those most in need.
“While precise figures are unavailable because of very limited official health or nutrition data, there are clear signs that the crisis is limiting children’s access to quality health services, medicines and food,” said the UN agency in a news release, Friday, underlining the severity of the situation.
According to UNICEF, national reports in 2009 (the most recent official figures) showed that the prevalence of wasting (low weight to height ratio) in children under five was, at the time, 3.2 per cent.
However, more recent non-official studies indicate “significantly higher rates” of as much as 15.5 per cent, and an additional 20 per cent of children at risk of malnutrition.
Similarly, the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017 (a comprehensive report on the subject prepared by a number of UN agencies) suggested that undernourishment – a measure of hunger indicating the proportion of population with inadequate energy consumption – in Venezuela rose from 10.5 per cent in 2004-2006 to 13 per cent in 2014-2016.
In response, the Venezuelan Government has implemented measures to mitigate the impact of the crisis on the country’s children, including providing regular food packages at affordable prices to the most vulnerable families, cash transfers, and strengthening of nutritional and recuperation services.
“But more needs to be done to reverse the worrisome decline in children’s nutritional wellbeing,” said UNICEF, calling for the rapid implementation of a short-term response to counter malnutrition, based on disaggregated data and coordinated between the Government and partners.
On its part, the UN agency is working with the Ministry of Health, National Institute of Nutrition and the civil society to strengthen and expand nutritional surveillance at the community level and provide nutritional recuperation services through partners organizations.
The efforts are being implemented through activities such as nutrition screening days aiming to reach over 113,000 children, provision of supplementary and therapeutic foods when required, training programmes and communication campaigns, added UNICEF.
Venezuela has been mired in a socio-economic and political crisis since 2012 and has witnessed rising consumer prices even as the overall economy has contracted.
***
Some 3 million Venezuelans—a tenth of the population—have left Venezuela since late leader Hugo Chavez started his socialist revolution in 1999. More than 500,000 have fled to Colombia—many illegally—hoping to escape grinding poverty, rising violence and shortages of food and medicine in the once-prosperous nation.
Photographer Jaime Saldarriaga joined Reuters journalists at the Paraguachón border crossing to document the exodus from Venezuela, which is now on a scale echoing the departure of Myanmar’s Rohingya people to Bangladesh.
Venezuelans line the street at the border between Venezuela and Colombia, in the city of Cúcuta. Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters
Hundreds of migrants lugging heavy suitcases and overstuffed backpacks walk along the road to the Colombian border town of Maicao, beneath the blazing sun. The Venezuelans arrive hungry, thirsty and tired, often unsure where they will spend the night—but they are relieved to have escaped the calamitous situation in their homeland.
The broken line snakes back eight miles (13 km) to the border crossing, where more than a hundred Venezuelans wait in the heat outside the migration office.
Venezuelans walk along a highway in Colombia after crossing the border at Paraguachón. Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters
A money changer uses a calculator at the Paraguachón border crossing between Colombia and Venezuela. Jaime Saldarriaga/Reuters
“It’s migrate and give it a try or die of hunger there. Those are the only two options,” Yeraldine Murillo, 27, who left her six-year-old son behind in the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, told Reuters. “There, people eat from the trash. Here, people are happy just to eat,” she said, adding she hopes to find work in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, and send for her son.
Migrants told Reuters they were paying up to 400,000 bolívares for a kilo of rice in Venezuela. The official monthly minimum wage is 248,510 bolívares—around $8 at the official exchange rate, or $1.09 on the black market.
Food shortages, which many migrants jokingly refer to as the “Maduro diet,” have left people noticeably thinner than in photos taken years earlier for their identification cards.
Mechanic Luis Arellano and his children were among the lucky ones who found beds at a shelter in Maicao run by the Catholic diocese with help from the U.N. refugee agency. The 58-year-old said his children’s tears of hunger drove him to flee Venezuela. “It was 8 p.m. and they were asking for lunch and dinner and I had nothing to give them,” he said, spooning rice into his 7-year-old daughter’s mouth. He raised his children’s spindly arms and said: “[These aren’t] the size they should be.”
The shelter, where bunk beds line the walls of the bedrooms, provides food and shelter for three days and, for those joining family already in Colombia, a bus ticket onwards. It will soon have a capacity for 140 people a night—a fraction of the daily arrivals.
At another shelter in the border city of Cucuta, some 250 miles (400 km) to the south, people regularly spend the night on cardboard outside, hoping places will free up. The largest city along the frontier, Cucuta, has borne the brunt of the arriving migrants.
About 30,000 people cross the pedestrian bridge that connects the city with Venezuela on daily entry passes to shop for food.
The mass migration is stirring alarm in Colombia. A migration official told Reuters as many as 2,000 Venezuelans enter Colombia legally through the border crossing at Paraguachón each day, up from around 1,200 late last year. But officials estimate as many as 4,000 people cross illegally every day.
Colombia is letting the migrants access public health care and send their children to state schools. Santos is asking for international help to foot the bill, which the government has said runs to tens of millions of dollars.
Under pressure from overcrowded frontier towns such as Maicao, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced a tightening of border controls this month, deploying 3,000 additional security personnel. But the measures are unlikely to stem the flow of illegal migrants pouring across the 1,379-mile (2,219 km) frontier.
While many feel a duty to welcome the migrants, in part because Venezuela accepted Colombian refugees during that country’s long civil war, others fear losing jobs to Venezuelans being paid under the table. After locals held a small anti-Venezuelan protest last month, police evicted 200 migrants who were living on a sports field, deporting many of them.
Migrants are verbally abused by some Colombians who refuse them work when they hear their accents, said Flavio Gouguella, 28, from Carabobo. “Are you a Veneco? Then no work,” he said, using a derogatory term for Venezuelans.
Locals also worry about an increase in crime and support police efforts to clear parks and sidewalks. They already have to cope with smuggled subsidized Venezuelan goods damaging local commerce, and have grown tired of job-seekers and lending their bathrooms to migrants. Spooked by police raids, migrants in Maicao have abandoned the parks and bus stations where they had makeshift camps, opting to sleep outside shuttered shops. Female migrants who spoke to Reuters said they were often solicited for sex.
Despairing of finding work, some entrepreneurial migrants turn the nearly worthless bolivar currency into crafts, weaving handbags from the bills and selling them in Maicao’s park. “This was made from 80,000 bolivars,” said 23-year-old Anthony Morillo, holding up a square purse featuring bills with the face of South America’s 19th-century liberation hero Simon Bolivar. “It’s not worth half a bag of rice.”
Despite four months of violent anti-government protests last year, Chavez’s successor Maduro is expected to win a fresh six-year term at elections on April 22. The opposition, whose most popular leaders have been banned from running, are boycotting the vote. Go here for more photos.
Has someone asked Senator Whitehouse his thoughts on ‘dark money’ by his own party?
Or this? Big Labor is among the most prolific political spenders in U.S. politics: From 2012 to 2014, America’s largest unions sent nearly $420 million to the Democratic Party and closely aligned special interest groups. The Democratic Governors Association raked in almost $8 million during that time, while Catalist—a premier Democratic data firm—made off with more than $5 million. (And that $420 million number doesn’t even include millions of dollars in candidate contributions from PAC money.)
Unions sent member dues money to an array of “dark money” liberal advocacy groups including the 501(c)(4) arms of the Center for American Progress, National Employment Law Project, and Partnership for Working Families—which aren’t required to report who funds them. George Soros’ Democracy Alliance—a secretive network of liberal donors—received more than $2 million during those years. And who are these donors? It’s not clear: According to The Washington Post, the group “does not disclose its members.”
Alabama’s special election is a case study in liberals’ furtive affair with secret cash
Democrats love decrying “dark money” — political contributions for which the source of funds is a mystery. But that isn’t stopping them from accepting “dark money” themselves or making it difficult to determine the original underwriter of a political donation, as a recent Southern contest vividly illustrates.
Alabama’s special U.S. Senate election in December is a case study in the lengths national Democrats, who this year are racing to win back Congress from Republicans, are willing to go to hide their cash in the name of political expediency.
Here’s what happened: When it seemed as if Democrat Doug Jones could actually beat embattled Republican Roy Moore, a new super PAC supposedly based in Birmingham, Alabama, appeared just one month before Election Day. The super PAC, called Highway 31 after a route that bisects Alabama, spent $5.1 million to boost Jones, more than any other group active in the general election.
Using a little-known legal loophole that allows political committees to do business on credit, the super PAC didn’t disclose the identities of its bankrollers until a month after voters chose Jones as their senator. And when Highway 31 did disclose, most of its funders turned out to be organizations who in turn receive some of their funding from sources that are difficult, if not impossible, to comprehensively trace to flesh-and-blood humans.
Highway 31 wasn’t exactly a homegrown group, either. All but about $10,000 of the $4.4 million the super PAC raised came from three national-level, Democratic-aligned entities: $3.2 million from super PAC Senate Majority PAC, $910,000 from the super PAC Priorities USA Action and $250,000 from the nonprofit League of Conservation Voters Inc.
Those millions allowed Highway 31 to relentlessly skewer Moore over accusations he molested children and helped propel Jones to an improbable victory in one of the nation’s most conservative states. Adam Muhlendorf, an Alabama communications consultant who led Highway 31, did not respond to requests for comment. Back in December, he told the Center for Public Integrity that the super PAC followed “every appropriate rule and regulation.”
Donors to the donors of the donors
So who funds Highway 31’s funders?
Senate Majority PAC’s biggest donations come from a handful of active billionaires: Newsweb Corp.’s Fred Eychaner with $2 million, Paloma Partners’ Donald Sussman with $1.5 million and billionaire businessman George Soros with $1 million. The super PAC’s donor list also includes pages and pages of comparatively small donations, and it boasts of how unambiguous its operations are.
“Running transparent, low-overhead, take-no-prisoners independent campaigns, we defend Democrats from Republican attacks, aggressively contest open Senate seats, and go after Republicans on their own turf,” reads the website of the super PAC, which former aides to then-Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., created in 2011 to compete with a network of Republican groups engineered by Republican political consultant Karl Rove.
But in 2017, at least $7.5 million of Senate Majority PAC’s funds came from labor unions, other super PACs and “social welfare” nonprofit groups. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission allowed such entities to spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for and against politicians and gave rise to super PACs, which in turn may accept unlimited contributions from them.
Three weeks ago, Lithuania accused Russia of deploying nuclear-capable ballistic missiles to its Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic, as relations between Moscow and the West sink to post-Cold War lows.
Putin said the weapons include a nuclear-powered cruise missile, a nuclear-powered underwater drone and new hypersonic missile that have no equivalent elsewhere in the world. He said the creation of the new weapons has made NATO’s U.S.-led missile defense “useless,” and means an effective end to what he described as Western efforts to stymie Russia’s development.
He noted that Russia had to develop the new weapons as the U.S. has developed a missile defense system that threatened to undermine the Russian nuclear deterrent and ignored Moscow’s concerns about it.
“No one has listened to us,” he said. “You listen to us now.” More here.
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual address to the country’s Federal Assembly today, showing off some impressive new weapons in the process. One of the concept videos even showed a nuclear strike using multiple warheads against the United States. The video depicts Florida, to be exact—the site of President Trump’s private club in Palm Beach.
“Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, any kind of attack, will be regarded as a nuclear attack against Russia and in response we will take action instantaneously no matter what the consequences are,” Putin said during the address. “Nobody should have any doubt about that.”
The editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-backed RT news outlet tweeted “Elon Musk my ass” in response to the new strategic nuclear weapons, poking fun at America’s obsession with private space companies like Space X.
The Assembly broke into applause during the segment above when the video showed that Russia’s new rocket could hit any target on the globe.
“With the new system, there is no limitation,” said Putin. “As you can see from this video, it can attack any target through the North Pole or via the South Pole. No missile defense system will be able to withstand it.”
And while the part of the video showing Florida was relatively brief, it wasn’t subtle. If you had any doubt that it’s showing Florida, take a look at this Google Maps image side-by-side with Russia’s attack video.
When North Korea produces this kind of animation, they tend to blow up a city like San Francisco. The country did just that in a video produced last April.
“But this isn’t the end. We’ve developed new strategic weapons that don’t use ballistic trajectory at all, which means that missile defense will be useless against it,” Putin bragged.
Putin admitted that they don’t have any names for the new system in the animation and got a chuckle when he asked for members of the audience to submit proposals to the Defense Ministry’s website.
The new weapon uses a “nuclear power energy unit,” according to Putin. “This is how it avoids defense barriers,” Putin explained as the video played.
“It has unlimited range, so it can keep going like this forever. As you understand, this is unheard of and no one has this system in the world. They may come up with something like this in the future, but by that time our guys will come up with some new ideas as well,” Putin said.
Putin also bragged about the noiseless “unmanned submarines” that can reach incredible depths that are “just fantastic.” The Russian president was sure to note that these were also capable of carrying nuclear weapons, though it’s unclear if the country has ever actually placed a nuke on a submarine without any humans aboard. All we know for sure right now is that their animators are working overtime.
Aside from weapons, Putin’s speech was heavy on romanticizing the glory days of the Soviet Union. Or at least romanticizing the resources that were at the nation’s disposal before its collapse.
“Russia lost 23.8 percent of its territory, 48.5 percent of its population, 41 percent of GDP, 39.4 percent of its industrial potential, 44.6 percent of the defensive capabilities,” Putin explained.
“It was a big question whether we’d be able to develop strategic weapons at all. Some even asked whether if Russia was capable of servicing nuclear weapons we inherited from the Soviet Union,” said Putin.
photo AP
Putin said that the new weapons were developed in direct response to the US withdrawing from the ABM Treaty in 2002.
“In 2000, the US told us about its plans to withdraw from the ABM Treaty. Russia objected to this categorically. We believed that the treaty, the 1972 treaty, was the cornerstone, the international security architecture,” Putin said.
The full video of Putin’s presentation with English translation is on RT’s YouTube channel. Putin’s discussion of the military begins at the 1 hour and 15 minute mark.
“We made no secret of our plans. We spoke openly of what we wanted to do,” Putin said about the new developments in nuclear technology.
“We wanted to motivate our counterparts—this was in 2004. Despite all of the difficulties we faced over the years, economic and financial problems, problems with our defense industry, with our armed forces, Russia remained a nuclear power, but nobody wanted to talk to us seriously,” Putin said.
“They kept ignoring us. Nobody listened to us. So, listen to us now,” he said to rapturous applause.
“Putin’s statement makes it clear we are in a new arms race that will put us under the terror of a new Cold War, in constant fear of death at any instant,” Beatrice Fihn, the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons told Gizmodo in a statement.
“While Russia and the US compare the size of their arsenals, the rest of the world is joining a treaty that bans them.”
If you had any doubts that the New Cold War was upon us, you can stop doubting.
Russian MOD web site asks people to name Putin’s new nukes http://vote.mil.ru/vote/krnd.htm Similar to when DOD last year asked people to name B-21 bomber.
Update 9:53am: As the Russian website Republic points out, the animation of Florida getting nuked was probably first produced by Russia as early as 2007, making Putin’s use of that particular video today even weirder.
Update 2:15pm: Apparently Putin wasn’t joking. Russia’s Ministry of Defense set up a page on its website where people can submit names for the new weapons.
Nukey McNukeface comes to mind, but submitting a jokey name might not be the smartest move. People who make fun of Putin don’t get treated very well inside of Russia.
No wonder Dennis Prager (Prager University) is suing YouTube for censorship.
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YouTube Trusted Flagger program
The YouTube Trusted Flagger program was developed by YouTube to help provide robust tools for government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are particularly effective at notifying YouTube of content that violates our Community Guidelines.
Individuals who are part of the YouTube Contributors program also frequently report videos that may violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines.
The YouTube Trusted Flagger program includes:
A bulk-flagging tool that allows for reporting multiple videos at one time
Private forum support for questions about the policy enforcement process
Visibility into decisions on flagged content
Prioritized flag reviews for increased actionability
Program eligibility
Government agencies and NGOs are eligible for participation in the YouTube Trusted Flagger program. Ideal candidates flag frequently and with a high rate of accuracy.
Before becoming deputized for participation, applicants must attend a YouTube training to learn about our Community Guidelines and enforcement processes. These trainings are led by YouTube’s Trust & Safety and Public Policy teams.
YouTube reserves the right to remove individuals from the Trusted Flagger program if they frequently flag content that does not violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines.
Flag review process
Videos flagged by trusted flaggers are reviewed by YouTube content moderators according to YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Content flagged by trusted flaggers is not automatically removed or subject to any differential policy treatment — the same standards apply for flags received from other users. However, because of their high degree of accuracy, flags from trusted flagger are prioritized for review by our teams.
The Trusted Flagger program exists exclusively for the reporting of possible Community Guideline violations. It is not a flow for reporting content that may violate local law. Requests based on local law can be filed through our content removal form.
Google, really?
YouTube Trusted Flaggers help Google fight terrorism online, along with better automated detection, content warnings, and counter-radicalization content
Google and YouTube are working along with Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter to help fight terrorism online.
Google has pledged a four-pronged strategy:
1. Improving automated systems that detect problematic videos.
We will now devote more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new “content classifiers” to help us more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content.
2. Expanding the Trusted Flagger program
Trusted flaggers – both individuals and organizations – flag content correctly more than 90% of the time.
We will expand this programme by adding 50 expert NGOs to the 63 organisations who are already part of the programme, and we will support them with operational grants. This allows us to benefit from the expertise of specialised organisations working on issues like hate speech, self-harm, and terrorism. We will also expand our work with counter-extremist groups to help identify content that may be being used to radicalise and recruit extremists.
3. Making inflammatory content harder to find and endorse
In future [videos that do not clearly violate policy, but contain inflammatory religious or supremecist content] will appear behind an interstitial warning and they will not be monetised, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements.
4. Using the “Redirect Method” for counter-radicalization efforts
… we are working with Jigsaw to implement the “Redirect Method” more broadly across Europe. This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining. In previous deployments of this system, potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.
*** So…..they use the Southern Poverty Law Center as a trusted flagger?
The Southern Poverty Law Center is assisting YouTube in policing content on their platform, The Daily Caller has learned.
The left-wing nonprofit — which has more recently come under fire for labeling legitimate conservative organizations as “hate groups” — is one of the more than 100 nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and government agencies in YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program, a source with knowledge of the arrangement told TheDC.
The SPLC and other program members help police YouTube for extremist content, ranging from so-called hate speech to terrorist recruiting videos.
All of the groups in the program have confidentiality agreements, a spokesperson for Google, YouTube’s parent company, previously told TheDC. A handful of YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers,” including the Anti-Defamation League and No Hate Speech — a European organization focused on combatting intolerance — have gone public with their participation in the program. The vast majority of the groups in the program have remained hidden behind their confidentiality agreements.
The SPLC’s close involvement in policing content on YouTube is likely to cause consternation among conservatives who worry that they may not be treated fairly. The left-wing group has consistently labeled pedestrian conservative organizations as “hate groups” and has been directly tied to violence against conservatives in the past. Floyd Lee Corkins, who opened fire at the Family Research Center in 2012, said he chose the FRC for his act of violence because the SPLC listed them as a “hate group.”
It’s unclear when the SPLC joined YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program. The program goes back to 2012 but exploded in size in recent years amid a Google push to increase regulation of the content on its platforms, which followed pressure from advertisers. Fifty of the 113 program members joined in 2017 as YouTube stepped up its content policing, YouTube public policy director Juniper Downs told a Senate committee in January.
Downs said the third-party groups work closely with YouTube’s employees to crack down on extremist content in two ways, both of which a Google spokesperson previously confirmed to TheDC.
First, the flaggers are equipped with digital tools allowing them to mass flag content for review by YouTube personnel. Second, the partner groups act as guides to YouTube’s content monitors and engineers designing the algorithms policing the video platform but may lack the expertise needed to tackle a given subject.
“We work with over 100 organizations as part of our Trusted Flagger program and we value the expertise these organizations bring to flagging content for review. All trusted flaggers attend a YouTube training to learn about our policies and enforcement processes. Videos flagged by trusted flaggers are reviewed by YouTube content moderators according to YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Content flagged by trusted flaggers is not automatically removed or subject to any differential policies than content flagged from other users,” said a YouTube spokesperson, who would not specifically comment on the SPLC’s participation in the program.
The SPLC did not return multiple voicemails and emails seeking comment.
The overwhelming majority of the content policing on Google and YouTube is carried out by algorithms. The algorithms make for an easy rebuttal against charges of political bias: it’s not us, it’s the algorithm. But actual people with actual biases write, test and monitor the algorithms.
As noted above, Google’s anonymous outside partners (such as the SPLC) work closely with the internal experts designing the algorithms. This close collaboration has upsides, Google’s representatives have said, such as in combatting terrorist propaganda on the platform.
But it also provides little transparency, forcing users to take Google’s word that they’re being treated fairly.
The SPLC has faced criticism for its cavalier definitions of “hate group” and “extremist.” The organization stoked controversy in 2015 by labeling Dr. Ben Carson, now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), an anti-gay “extremist.” After a backlash, the SPLC reversed its ruling and apologized to Carson.
The Washington Examiner’s Emily Jashinsky noted last year that “the SPLC’s claim to objectivity is nothing less than fraudulent, a reality that informed observers of its practices from both the Left and Right accept.”
“The routine of debunking their supposedly objective classifications occurs like clockwork each time a major outlet makes the mistake of turning to them when reporting on the many conservative thinkers and nonprofits the group absurdly designates as hateful.”
The SPLC has faced tough criticisms not just from conservatives but from the mainstream press as well.
“At a time when the line between ‘hate group’ and mainstream politics is getting thinner and the need for productive civil discourse is growing more serious, fanning liberal fears, while a great opportunity for the SPLC, might be a problem for the nation,” Politico Magazine’s Ben Schreckinger wrote last year.
Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle similarly noted last year that the SPLC commonly lumps in principled conservatives alongside actual racists and extremists and warned of the possibility that tech companies could rely on the SPLC’s misleading definitions.
“Given the increasing tendency of powerful tech companies to flex their muscle against hate groups,” she wrote, “we may see more and more institutions unwittingly turned into critics or censors, not just of Nazi propaganda, but also of fairly mainstream ideas.”
Police secure roads around U.S. Embassy in Ankara on Monday. Umit Bektas / Reuters
photo AP
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