Is Elon Musk using his powerful Twitter account to bully Big Tech tyrants into supporting Free Speech?

Earlier this month, Musk warned activist groups and advertisers that he may use his new bully pulpit to launch a “thermonuclear name & shame” if they work to try and destroy free speech in America. 

Thank you.

A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

On Monday, Musk went hard against Apple CEO Tim Cook for threatening “to withhold Twitter from it’s App Store” and pulling most advertising from his site.

“Do they hate free speech in America?” Musk asked.

Musk met with Cook personally at Apple HQ on Wednesday and thanked him for taking him around. 

Thanks @tim_cook for taking me around Apple’s beautiful HQ pic.twitter.com/xjo4g306gR

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022

Musk said on Wednesday night they had a “good conversation.”

“Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk said. “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”

Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022

I suspect Musk said it was just a “misunderstanding” to allow Cook to save face. 

He was clear on Monday that Apple had threatened to remove Twitter from the App Store but wouldn’t give a reason why. 

Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

What’s going on here @tim_cook?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

The most likely reason was the fact he’s unbanning thousands of Twitter users who were purged for legally protected, truthful speech that groups like the Anti-Defamation League label “hate.”

In my mind, there’s no question Apple was threatening to ban Musk’s Twitter and I also have no doubt Google will threaten to ban him next. 

Nonetheless, using his bully pulpit he appears to have brought Cook to heel. 

This is no small threat. We all saw this past week how Balenciaga (who canceled Ye) got canceled themselves over their BDSM-themed photoshoot with children. Disney was also hit hard due to backlash on social media over their LGBT propaganda targeting children. 

Whereas Twitter under Jack Dorsey, Parag Agrawal and Yoel Roth was centered around canceling powerless white “Karens” for complaining about poor customer service in Third World America, Twitter under Musk is threatening to cancel some of the most powerful companies in the world for attacking and undermining Free Speech. 

This post was originally published at Information liberation

Major tax filing services, including H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer, have been covertly sending Facebook sensitive financial information when Americans file their taxes online, according to The Markup.

The data includes names, email addresses, income, filing status, refund amounts and college scholarship information – which is sent to Facebook regardless of whether a person even has a Facebook account – or with other platforms owned by Meta. The company can then be used to fine tune advertising algorithms.

It is sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel.

Of note, Intuit-owned TurboTax does use Meta Pixel, however the company did not send financial information – just usernames and the last time a device signed in. Beyond that, they have kept Pixel entirely off pages beyond sign in.

Each year, the Internal Revenue Service processes about 150 million individual returns filed electronically, and some of the most widely used e-filing services employ the pixel, The Markup found. 

When users sign up to file their taxes with the popular service TaxAct, for example, they’re asked to provide personal information to calculate their returns, including how much money they make and their investments. A pixel on TaxAct’s website then sent some of that data to Facebook, including users’ filing status, their adjusted gross income, and the amount of their refund, according to a review by The Markup. Income was rounded to the nearest thousand and refund to the nearest hundred. The pixel also sent the names of dependents in an obfuscated, but generally reversible, format. -The Markup

TaxAct, which services around three million “consumer and professional users,” also sends data to Google via the company’s analytics tool, however names are not included in the information.

“We take the privacy of our customers’ data very seriously,” said TaxAct spokeswoman Nicole Coburn. “TaxAct, at all times, endeavors to comply with all IRS regulations.”

H&R Block embedded a pixel on its site that included information on filers’ health savings account usage, dependents’ college tuition grants and expenses. The company similarly claimed in a very boilerplate statement that they “regularly evaluate[s] our practices as part of our ongoing commitment to privacy, and will review the information.”

While TaxSlayer – which says it completed 10 million federal and state returns last year – provided Facebook information on filers as part of the social media giant’s “advanced matching” system which attempts to link information from people browsing the web to Facebook accounts. The information sent includes phone numbers and the name of the user filling out the form, as well as the names of any dependents added to the return. Specific demographic information was also obscured, but Facebook was still able to link them to existing profiles.

Another tax filing service, Ramsey Solutions, told The Markup that the company “implemented the Meta Pixel to deliver a more personalized customer experience,” but that they “did NOT know and were never notified that personal tax information was being collected by Facebook from the Pixel.”

“As soon as we found out, we immediately informed TaxSlayer to deactivate the Pixel from Ramsey SmartTax.”

Harvard Law School lecturer and tax law specialist Mandi Matlock said the findings showed that taxpayers have been “providing some of the most sensitive information that they own, and it’s being exploited.”

“This is appalling,” she added. “It truly is.”

Read more here…

This post was originally published at Zero Hedge

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The top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee warned Sunday that TikTok is a national security threat and that President Trump was right to want to ban it in 2020.

Committee Chairman Senator Mark Warner told Fox News Sunday “I think Donald Trump was right, I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat, it’s a threat on two levels.”

“One, it is a massive collector of information, oftentimes of our children. They can visualize even down to your keystrokes. So If you’re a parent and you’ve got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned,” Warner explained.

He added, “All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”

“The idea that we can somehow separate out TikTok from the fact the actual engineers writing the code in Beijing I think is a — The Justice Department’s trying to come up with a solution. I’m going to take a look at that solution, but they’ve got a huge mountain to climb,” the Senator further noted.

“The second problem is that TikTok in a sense is a broadcasting network.” Warner continued, adding “And if the Chinese Communist Party and TikTok at the end of the day has to be reliant on the Communist Party, the Chinese law states that.”

“If they suddenly want to dial up the fact that we’re going to decrease the content that criticizes Chinese leadership but increase the content that your kids may be seeing saying, hey, you know, Taiwan really is part of China, that is a distribution model that would make RT or Sputnik or some of the Russian propaganda models pale in comparison,” he further stated.

Earlier in the broadcast, Republican Senator Tom Cotton warned that China is lying about claims that it stores Americans’ TikTok user data in the United States with backups in Singapore.

“There have been reports indicating that that data is accessible in mainland China. That TikTok, a Chinese company, is subject to communist China’s laws and that TikTok is one of the most massive surveillance programs ever, especially on America’s young people,” Cotton stated.

“It’s not just the contents you upload to TikTok but all the data on your phone and other apps, all your personal information, even facial imagery, even where your eyes are looking on your phone,” Cotton added.

“That’s why I’ve encouraged every American, if they’re using TikTok, to delete it from their phone if they can, to get a new phone all together,” The Senator further warned.

The Chinese-owned video app, which is notorious as perhaps the most censorious in existence, has previously allowed fake news about Trump resigning to go viral, has censored videos that make fun of Dr. Anthony Fauci, has removed videos that highlighted inconsistencies in Amber Heard’s testimony, and has also threatened to censor criticism of Joe Biden.

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