Whitehouse “FREEDOM OF SPEECH” phishing scam
A few days ago the Whitehouse’s official twitter account tweeted a link to a website containing this text:
SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies.
No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.
The website isn’t an official Whitehouse dot gov address and it isn’t an official trump2020 campaign website subject to Federal Election Commission (FEC) laws. But its terms and conditions make it clear that it is designed to gather information about you “so we can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter… you understand this form is for information gathering only.”
The good news is that unlike “Army of Jesus”, “Being Patriotic”, “Defend the 2nd”, “Heart of Texas”, “Stop All Invaders”, “Veterans Come First” and hundreds of other Facebook and other social media pages, this one was not created by Vladmir Putin’s Internet Research Association (IRA).
A whois lookup shows it is hosted by amazon:
Domain Name:
typeform.com
Registry Domain ID: 87721355_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.registrar.amazon.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: registrar-abuse@amazon.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.2067406200
I browsed it from internet archive to keep it from gathering my ip address and web cookies and certainly didn’t provide any real info to its intrusive forms which ask for name, phone number, zip code and that they can edit and use your response for any purpose they’d like (donation robocalls, push polls, selling to SPAM marketeers, sharing with Konstantin Kilimnik, doxing?)
If you feel you are being censored and that the first amendment requires private companies to broadcast every American’s belief, rant and tweet-depth thought, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) https://onlinecensorship.org. Their page has been online for many years and has a data privacy statement on their front page.
Everything from this president’s obsessive use of twitter and smartphones to his failure to acknowledge Putin’s powerful social media disinformation campaign tells me that you should not trust personal information to this phishing site.
Be careful what you click, like, emoji, submit or otherwise submit information about you and your gut reaction to online content. I’ve been on the internet for 30 years and never has there been a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
