Considering US tech companies helped overthrow their democracy - they should all be considered extreme threats to national security.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
I can't think of a more glowing endorsement of said legislation.
Get fucked Nazi.
The shit they've already gotten away with is fucking insane. I cannot believe nobody has ever called them out for COVID masking bullshit
“I will continue to point out to my tech minister counterparts the ways they can create a regulatory environment to allow AI to thrive,”
I would like to continue to point out to his tech minister counterparts that Kratsios was responsible for preventing the spread of online disinformation in the U.S. during the earliest days of COVID.
Shout out to the broligarchs who stepped in by early March to use cutting "edge technology" to keep COVID disinformation from spreading across social media:
March 2020: White House seeks assistance from tech companies in fight against coronavirus
In a phone call, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios implored the companies to help out with an “all-hands-on-deck effort” to fight the new coronavirus. “The White House’s top priority is ensuring the safety and health of the American people amid the COVID-19 outbreak,” Kratsios said in a statement. “Cutting edge technology companies and major online platforms will play a critical role in this all-hands-on-deck effort.” According to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, top tech trade groups and companies participated in the call, including Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, the Consumer Technology Association, the Information Technology Industry Council and others. The meeting revolved around how the tech industry can better coordinate with the government to get out authoritative facts about the coronavirus while cracking down on the spread of bunk cures and conspiracy theories spreading online.
Remember how we didn't know for the longest time if we all should be bothering with masks? Crazy how so many people died because of that little "misunderstanding." I'm pretty sure the U.S. was like the only country where it was even really debated...
Federal officials initially discouraged the general public from wearing masks for protecting themselves from COVID-19. In early April, federal officials reversed their guidance, saying that the general public should wear masks to lessen transmission by themselves, particularly from asymptomatic carriers. Public health experts such as Larry Gostin stated that federal officials should have recommended mask-wearing sooner;others noted that US government guidance lagged significantly behind mask recommendations in East Asian countries and likely exacerbated the scale of the pandemic in the United States.
I wonder why masking ever became so debatable on social media, and only in the U.S. when these guys were trying to keep disinformation from being spread? Oh well, when a billionaire decides to bother trying to help you, I guess the least you can do is show how grateful your are and say thank you, so I guess thank you for your services broligarchs 🫡
Even if you couldn't stop the mask debate from spiraling out of control, it's not like y'all intentionally didn't want people masking up right? Like what incentive could tech bros (including Peter Thiel's protege, Michael Kratsios) have possibly had in March of 2020 to try and discourage people from masking?
•March 2020: Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich •March 2020: What is Clearview AI and why is it raising so many privacy red flags? •May 2025: The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI
When the Department of Defense scheduled a meeting in January 2020 for Clearview to pitch its services, the invite included Johnson. The following month, Ton-That sent his friend a proposal to compensate Johnson in Clearview stock for advisory services he provided to the company “with respect to developing, marketing and selling its technology.” In July 2020, Johnson helped Schwartz draft a letter for Rep. Matt Gaetz—a personal friend of Johnson’s—to send to top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, lobbying them to use Clearview to smoke out spies among the “400,000 Chinese nationals who enter the U.S. every year as foreign students.”
By the end of Trump’s first presidential term, Clearview had secured funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s earliest business partners, and signed up hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country.
July 2020: Peter Thiel’s New Man In The Defense Department
The Pentagon’s new 33-year-old head of research and engineering lacks a basic science degree but brings deep connections to Donald Trump and controversial Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Too bad their plan to fight online disinformation about masking failed, I guess...
If our government is complaining, you’re probably doing something good. Please do carry on.
Not a single mention of any of the downsides of AI or any controversy at all outside of a tiny mention of the EU saying there are "risks" to them. Garbage reporting.
I skip articles where the headline contains "slams' at this point
Don't blame you
America: your talking asshole has been randomly threatening the rest of the world. Why should we care about anything you idiots say? America is like North Korea now - nothing you say matters because nothing you say can be trusted. If shit-for-brains decides to invade someone, no amount of reasoning, mutual benefit, or diplomacy will stop him. We don't have to listen to you any more.

Me when Americans talk on the world stage
S L A M S
Give your balls a tug bud.
slurp slurp slurp - Michael Kratsios
As long as you're ok with helping the U.S. destroy democracy and speed up the establishment of an authoritarian global surveillance state (privately owned of course) for your real boss and the people that pay money to listen to him rant about the antichrist, what he's saying isn't unreasonable.
He's always believed that a country's values are baked into technology. That's why nobody needs regulations.
However, if you think that collecting data to improve facial recognition tech didn't really justify intentionally spreading misinformation about masking during COVID, then you might not be interested in slurping the kool aid he's so generously ~~threatening~~ offering.