• A spokesperson for Telegram, Remi Vaughn, says the app will not respond to political censorship requests
• “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law:” Elon Musk on Twitter censorship requests
• Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hints at taking action against Twitter CEO after he encouraged engagement with popular AOC impersonator account
• Discord admins hacked by malicious Javascript bookmarklets throughout the month of May
• Journalists behind Twitter Files watershed moment join hands to fight the censorship industrial complex
  

Elsewhere online: 

• 1.4 Million Social Media Posts Removed in China’s ‘Self-Media’ Purge
• ‘Lancefly’ APT group is using ‘Merdoor’ for their espionage campaign
• FBI and GCHQ successfully thwart Russian malware hacking tool
• New stealthy version of Linux BPFdoor malware detected in the wild
• Cyber espionage campaign utilizes PowerExchange backdoor

A spokesperson for Telegram, Remi Vaughn, says the app will not respond to political censorship requests

Telegram has refused to participate in political censorship. The popular messaging app has yet to cooperate with the Malaysian Communications and Digital Ministry to take down political content. While speaking to the News Strait Times, a spokesperson for Telegram, Remi Vaughn, said that the platform actively moderates harmful content, including public pornography and the sale of illegal drugs, as well as removing content that violates its terms of service.

“Telegram will not, however, participate in any form of political censorship,” Vaughn added in his statement.

He also added that the platform actively monitors public content and responds to user reports through the Telegram app and designated email address to ensure the moderation of otherwise harmful material.

Last week, the Malaysian Communications and Digital Minister, Fahmi Fadzil, confirmed that Telegram had indeed not been complying with government moderation requests since January this year. Fadzil has said in a statement that the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), which regulates the country’s tech platforms, will consider how to respond to the messaging service’s non-compliance.

Read: https://reclaimthenet.org/telegram-says-it-wont-respond-to-political-censorship-requests

I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”: Elon Musk on Twitter censorship requests

Self-dubbed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk has recently been criticized for giving in to various international governments’ censorship demands. Musk claimed on Sunday that Twitter has “no actual choice” about complying with such requests. When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he explained his approach to free speech as follows: “Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? If that is the case…we have free speech.” At the time, he also added that Twitter would be “very reluctant to delete things” and be “very cautious with permanent bans.”

However, in recent weeks, Musk has faced blowback for appearing to cave to government censorship demands, including by removing some accounts and tweets at the behest of the government of Turkey ahead of the country’s elections (which the company has said it will attempt to fight in court). In another interview with the BBC last month, Musk said he didn’t know “what exactly happened” when asked if Twitter had removed a documentary about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the request of the Indian government.

Musk has previously said the company would comply with laws governing social media companies worldwide. However, such laws, in some cases, appear to conflict with his free speech vision. In last month’s interview with the BBC, Musk said, “The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country.”

Before Musk’s takeover, however, Twitter frequently fought government takedown requests in court, publicly releasing detailed information about such requests and how it handled them. In many cases, Twitter led the charge among social media companies in protecting its users’ rights around the world.

Read: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-government-takedown

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hints at taking action against Twitter CEO after he encouraged engagement with popular AOC impersonator account

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has hinted at taking action against Twitter after the site’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk encouraged a popular satirical account that acts as her Twitter impersonator.

“There’s a fake account on here impersonating me,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, referring to the viral “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody)” account, which has more than 100,000 followers.

Ocasio-Cortez says Musk “boosted (the) visibility” of the account, which is spreading false information about the Congresswoman and her views. Ocasio-Cortez has said she is “assessing with (her) team how to move forward.”

On Monday, Musk replied to the Ocasio-Cortez impersonator with a fire emoji after they posted a tweet saying she (Ocasio-Cortez) thinks she has a “crush” on the billionaire. Though the account is marked as a parody, its verified status could be misleading to followers. The account’s lengthy name also obscures its parody designation on mobile devices, making it challenging to identify it as such.

The First Amendment protects parody content as free speech. Elon Musk and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are two of Twitter’s most-followed leaders on social media, and given the Congresswoman’s far-left politics and Musk’s frequent association with the fringe right, the pair have formed something of a social media rivalry.

The duo has interacted with each other on social media numerous times over the past few years, especially leading up to and following Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last October. Ocasio-Cortez tallied nearly 700,000 likes in November on a tweet flaming Musk’s pushing of Twitter’s paid subscription plan, while Musk’s response asking to collect her $8 monthly fee got one million likes. Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most prominent users on Bluesky, the Twitter alternative founded by Twitter’s cofounder and long-time CEO, Jack Dorsey.

Read: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/05/30/aoc-threatens-musk-for-promoting-her-twitter-impersonator/

Discord admins hacked by malicious Javascript bookmarklets throughout the month of May

Several Discord admins found their accounts had been compromised by a suspicious phishing attempt throughout May. According to interviews with victims of the attack, most attacks started with an interview request from someone posing as a reporter for a crypto-focused news outlet online. For those who took the bait, a link was sent to a fake server masked as the crypto news site’s official Discord account. Here, victims were asked to complete a verification step to validate their identity.

The verification process involved dragging a button from the phony Discord server to the bookmarks bar in your personal browser. After completing this step, the visitor is instructed to return to Discord.com and click on the new bookmark to complete their verification process.

However, this bookmark is a clever piece of Javascript code that quietly grabs the user’s Discord token and sends it to the scammer’s website. The attacker then loads the stolen token into their own browser session and (usually late at night after the admins are asleep) posts an announcement in the targeted Discord about an exclusive “airdrop,” “NFT mint event,” or some other potential money-making opportunity for the Discord members.

In this way, unsuspecting Discord followers are tricked into clicking on the admin’s phishing link, where they are then asked to connect their crypto wallet to the scammer’s site. Here, followers are asked for unlimited spend approvals on their tokens; thus, their account’s balance is completely drained. Meanwhile, anyone in the compromised Discord channel who calls out the scam is banned, and their messages are deleted by the compromised admin account.

The type of verification method used above involves a type of bookmark called a “bookmarklet,” which stores Javascript code as a clickable link in the bookmarks bar at the top of one’s browser. We recommend avoiding adding (or dragging) any bookmarks or bookmarklets to your browser on a third party’s behest and only to do so if it was your idea in the first place.

Read: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/discord-admins-hacked-by-malicious-bookmarks/

Journalists behind Twitter Files watershed moment join hands to fight the censorship industrial complex

It has been nearly 6 months since the first installment of the Twitter Files, writes Charlie Tidmarsh over at RealClear Wire. The Twitter files were a ground-breaking journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and others to expose the many back channels by which the U.S. government had influenced content moderation and censorship on Twitter’s massive platform. From Hunter Biden’s laptop to the tendrils of a governmental apparatus that influenced some of the most significant media distortions in recent American history, the Twitter files will certainly go down as a watershed moment in history.

Yet, writes Charlie Tidmarsh, not many commentators are treating these anti-democratic actions as interconnected expressions of a single censorship apparatus. Michael Shellenberger and his colleagues Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi are now reportedly undertaking a monumental attempt at defining such an apparatus: they call it the Censorship Industrial Complex. Shellenberger and Gutentag are two of the few journalists who take the reality of increased government censorship efforts seriously and consider it a systemic, unified, and global threat, as opposed to a few discreet but regrettable extensions of U.S. political power.

Tidmarsh says the Censorship Industrial Complex is founded on euphemistic neologisms — terms like “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “infodemic,” and, absurdly, “misinformation” — and is prosecuted by a coterie of journalists, academics, NGOs, and nonprofits who claim neutral expertise in adjudicating what is true and what is false. World governments have eerily aligned their definitions of these terms and then cooperated with non-state actors to censor online speech in accordance, all with the stated and ostensibly noble aim of “reducing harm.”

According to Shellenberger et al., at their substack, Public, what tends to unify these efforts is a reliance on identical, porous definitions of what counts as harmful or hateful information, as well as an emphasis on words such as “safety,” “harm reduction,” and “protection.” This is precisely what makes the Censorship Industrial Complex so insidious. No one wants truly false information to dominate our important discussion spaces or genuine hate to crowd out constructive public discourse. But the verbiage these governments operate with grants tremendous leeway in how such speech is defined and censored.

Read: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/combating-censorship-industrial-complex

Elsewhere Online:

1.4 Million Social Media Posts Removed in China’s ‘Self-Media’ Purge
Read: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/china-deletes-14m-social-media-posts-in-crack-down-on-self-media-accounts

‘Lancefly’ APT group is using ‘Merdoor’ for their espionage campaign
Read: https://cyware.com/news/lancefly-apt-group-uses-merdoor-in-espionage-campaign-3939c8bc/

FBI and GCHQ successfully thwart Russian malware hacking tool
Read: https://www.hackread.com/fbi-gchq-foil-russian-malware-hacking-tool/

New stealthy version of Linux BPFdoor malware detected in the wild
Read: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/stealthier-version-of-linux-bpfdoor-malware-spotted-in-the-wild/

New cyber espionage campaign utilizes PowerExchange backdoor
Read: https://thehackernews.com/2023/05/new-powerexchange-backdoor-used-in.html