Culture In Which All Truth Is Relative Suddenly Concerned About Fake News | The Babylon Bee - "Tech conglomerates such as Facebook and Google have vowed to meet the trend head-on, assuring the public that they are taking bold steps to filter out any news that contradicts the version of truth that they decide is acceptable."
Babylon Bee CEO posted this to Instagram and they're now threatening to ban him for "harmful false information" and "hate speech." WHAT?? - "They do not allow you to express the perfectly reasonable *opinion* that masks don't need to be worn outside. It is far more harmful to silence opinions than to walk around outside without a mask. Lebron James can say black men are "literally hunted" every time they leave their homes (false, harmful), but I can't express the opinion that masks aren't necessary outdoors (true, reasonable)."
Exclusive -- Poll: 97% of Independents and Republicans Believe Facebook and Instagram Should Not Have Banned Donald Trump - "The Internet Accountability Project conducted a poll in which 97 percent of independents and Republicans believe Facebook and Instagram should not have banned former President Donald Trump... The poll also asked if the U.S. government should “have permitted Facebook to buy its competitors Instagram and WhatsApp.” Eighty-four percent of respondents said no, and six percent said yes. Respondents were additionally asked if Americans should “have more control over and own their online data.” Ninety-seven percent said yes, and nearly one percent did not know."
We need to stop the spread of Big Tech censorship - "Take Facebook, home to around 2.6 billion monthly active users. During this crisis it has moved the goalposts dramatically on what can be posted. At first, it said it would continue to remove ‘misinformation that could contribute to imminent physical harm’, while deploying its army of fact-checkers to flag certain posts, depress their distribution, and direct sharers of such material to ‘reliable’ information. Just a few weeks on and it is removing event posts for anti-lockdown protests in various US states, in tandem with state officials. Last month it was revealed that Facebook had removed event pages for anti-lockdown protests in California, New Jersey and Nebraska. A spokesperson told Politico that Facebook ‘reached out to state officials to understand the scope of their orders’ and resolved to ‘remove the posts when gatherings do not follow the health parameters established by the government and are therefore unlawful’, such as when protests intend to flout social-distancing rules. Facebook has stressed that state governments did not ask them to remove specific posts. But what seems to have happened is almost worse. Facebook moderators appear to be banning events posts on the basis of what they reckon the laws of a particular state constitute. As David Kaye, UN special rapporteur on free expression, told the Guardian: ‘If people show up to protest – and I think the vast majority of public-health officials think that’s really dangerous – it’s up to the government to clamp down on them. For Facebook to do it just seems suspect.’ What’s more, Kaye continued, this informal arrangement reached between Facebook and state governments will make it harder for citizens to challenge instances of censorship. If a state government were to issue a formal takedown notice to Facebook, asking it to remove a post for an illegal protest, then that government action would at least be subject to a challenge in court. But Facebook, a private company, is allowed to take down whatever it wants and is protected from legal liability. This is, in effect, government outsourcing censorship to the private sector. Even if straightforward takedown requests aren’t being made, the increasingly cosy relationship between Big Tech, governments and intergovernmental organisations is leading to elite consensus effectively being enforced on social media. In a recent interview with CNN, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said her platform will remove ‘anything that is medically unsubstantiated’, as well as ‘anything that goes against WHO [World Health Organisation] recommendations’, essentially asserting this one UN agency as infallible and its critics as heretics. As many have pointed out, this standard is almost impossible to enforce consistently – not least because the WHO has got a fair bit wrong over the course of this pandemic, and in previous crises. But it seems YouTube’s guidelines are now sufficiently broad that it can take down any dissident post that sparks outrage. It recently banned a viral video of two doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who run a group of urgent care centres in Bakersfield, California, discussing the data they have drawn from Covid testing, and arguing that California should lift its lockdown. Experts and commentators have questioned the doctors’ claims and conclusions, and even their motivations (apparently one of them is a Trump supporter). But these two are not snarling conspiracy theorists. They are experienced medics giving their opinions on the data as they see it. But this apparently cannot be hosted on YouTube because, in the words of a spokesperson, it ‘disputes the efficacy of local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing’. It seems you cannot question the wisdom of the authorities at all... Facebook and YouTube now monopolise huge arenas of public discussion. Writers and thinkers unable to promote their work on Facebook, or videomakers unable to upload their work to YouTube, are effectively denied access to a significant portion of what now constitutes the public square. At a time when billions of people are under house arrest, and the literal public square is largely off-limits, this is an even more sinister development. As is the fact that governments and powerful organisations seem to be working hand in glove with tech firms to enforce conformity."
Meme - "Your comment has been removed It goes against our Community Guidelines on hate speech or symbols. Our guidelines encourage people to express themselves in a way that's respectful to everyone. If you think we made a mistake, you can ask us to review our decision."
"Your comment goes against our guidelines on hate speech or symbols
He dindu nuffin"
Facebook Replaces All Text Fields With Dropdown Menu Of Approved Things You Can Say | The Babylon Bee - "In the never-ending quest to end disinformation and encourage good vibes, Facebook has carefully curated dozens of canned phrases including, but not limited to:
Check out this selfie, fellow human.
The vaccine is safe and effective.
Black Lives Matter, friend.
Here are some baby pictures, friend.
My dog is my best friend, friend.
I'm just chilling at home. Here come the beverages!
We must seize the means of production for the proletariat.
A spokesperson for Meta confirmed this is step one of an innovative new plan to gradually get people tired of Facebook and push them into the Metaverse no one is excited about. "The plan is that all Facebook users will be in the Metaverse. Human beings not on Facebook currently will be in the next phase of the plan when we dispatch our security team," said the Meta representative."
Ricky Gervais's cat has had its Twitter account suspended - "The award-winning British celebrity Ricky Gervais's beloved cat, Pickles, has somehow also ran afoul of Twitter's guidelines and managed to get his account suspended... past Twitter posts by the feline appear to not have supported US President Trump, much less have had anything to do with QAnon or similar groups."
The Silicon Valley inquisition gathers pace - "The past few weeks have seen another round of purging, by online platform or financial service providers, of content creators who rely on the internet for a living. The reasons for doing so are varied but usually default to some kind of transgression of their terms and conditions of use. However these Ts and Cs tend to be vaguely worded and appear to be selectively enforced, leading to fears that these decisions have been driven as much by subjective ideology as any exceptional misbehaviour on the part of creators... We have previously written about the coordinated banning of InfoWars from pretty much all internet publication channels and a subsequent purge of ‘inauthentic activity’ from social media. Now we can add commentator Gavin McInnes to the list of people apparently banned from all public internet platforms and, most worryingly of all, the removal of popular YouTuber Sargon of Akkad from micro-funding platform Patreon."
From 2018
Perma Banned - Posts | Facebook - "Twitter: *bans moderates, centrists, and rights over jokes and wrongthink, call them all terries and racists*
Also Twitter: *leaves these tweets up till today, and allows certain stuff trending*
Elon snatching and cleaning it up can't come sooner"
Carlos Maza on Twitter - "Fascists literally do not care how hard you vote. They are not trying to win elections. Violence is the only language they understand, and it’s time we start speaking it."
Meme - Andrew Surabian: "Twitter allowing straight up racist attacks on Clarence Thomas to trend
Trending in United States
Uncle Clarence"
Carlos Maza: "In stardew valley Ballot *Molotov Cocktail* Box *Court building, target for Molotov Cocktail*"
Only left wing violence and racism are acceptable
Not the Bee on Twitter - "As you watch the Left call for widespread violence and destruction, with immunity from @Twitter, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you that @TheBabylonBee is still locked out of their account for a joke headline that referred to Rachel Levine as a man."
Exclusive: YouTube Censors Man Sharing Regrets About Transgenderism - "Heritage is fighting back with a new video, released first to The Federalist, in which Federalist contributor Walt Heyer doubles down"
YouTube removes Tucker Carlson interview with woman who detransitioned - "Helena Kerschner began taking testosterone at the age of 18. She was lured into the realm of trans ideology, and believing that she was not female, after delving into online fan fiction communities. She spoke to Tucker Carlson, and when a clip of her interview was posted to YouTube, it was taken down for "violating YouTube's policy on spam, deceptive practices and scams.""
Dave Cullen (Computing Forever) Banned from YouTube - " With just over 500,000 subscribers, Cullen who originally started his life on the channel 14 years ago primarily as a technology reviewer, made a name for himself among rightist circles due to his drift into conservative and nationalist politics. More recently he has led the charge in the critique of the science behind state-mandated lockdowns and the emergence of what he believed to be a technocratic police state by means of a ‘Great Reset’."
Hot Takes Nobody Asked For - Posts | Facebook - "The intent of this page was to criticize any take that's hot, regardless of what the person's political affiliation is or lack thereof. I've criticized my heroes multiple times. A hot take is a hot take. But FB gave us strikes and suspensions for sharing bad right takes, even though we were sharing it to criticize it. They rarely do this with left takes, even when it's misinformation, not just a bad opinion. Because of this, we eventually got the point of sharing more left takes than right takes. There were some juicy takes we were dying to share here from the right, but we knew we would get suspended. We just wanted to point this out for people who think we are like libs of TikTok or something. We aren't, no disrespect to them. We want to make fun of any bad take. Sometimes the takes are apolitical. (Politics is more than left and right, but we're just using those terms to explain.)"
Rob Schneider on Twitter - "It’s extremely fitting that THIS tweet @Twitter found to have ‘sensitive content’ because it is the foundational statements of Freedom from the heroes of our republic!"
Of course, we are still told that conservatives are deluded about Big Tech having a bias against them
Facebook - "Black Japanese Generals celebrating their victory over Russia in 1907. They are of Ainu ancestry. The Ainu were of African descent who migrated and settled in ancient Japan. You may have read in history about Japan defeating Russia in a brilliant naval / military campaign at Port Arthur. Well, here they are."
Facebook never flags the we wuz kangz people for misinformation of course
Meme - "Fact checkers be like: He didn't say that, and if he did, he didn't mean it, and if he did you don't understand it, and if you did, it's not a big deal, and if it is, it's taken out of context, and if it wasn't, others have done it, and if they haven't, at least orange man gone."
Elon Musk jokes Twitter would have censored Paul Revere, criticizes for ‘squashing dissenting opinions’ - "World-famous industrialist billionaire and possible future owner of Twitter Elon Musk slammed the platform's current leadership with a humorous tweet on July 4, then agreed with another user bemoaning Jordan Peterson's suspension by saying the company's "going way too far in squashing dissenting opinions." Musk appeared to get into the spirit of Independence Day by sharing a fake Tweet depicting "Twitter in 1775" where iconic American historical figure Paul Revere was fact-checked by Twitter for saying, "The British are coming, the British are coming!" The fake tweet depicted a misinformation label reading, "Learn how British taxes are beneficial for society."... Another Twitter user responded to Musk with a similar fake tweet from Greek philosopher Socrates, who was famously poisoned by the Greek government for criticizing the ruling elite of his own time. The tweet showed Socrates theorizing, "I dunno man, I’m beginning to think that maybe the Ruling Elite aren’t as wise as they claim to be," and featured a similar spoof of a Twitter fact-check alert, reading, "Learn more about how Socrates is corrupting the youth of Athens.""
Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "YouTube has PERMANENTLY DEMONETIZED my channel because I am critical of Biden’s foreign policy decisions."
Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter - "Twitter consults with the US government when deciding what to censor, consults with US government-funded think tanks to determine what people see on the platform, conducts censorship in favor of US government narratives, and has the gall to label others "state-affiliated media"."
MSNBC on Twitter - "By now we should all be used to Greene’s transphobic antics. But this latest incident is an escalation in rhetoric, Katelyn Burns writes. 'Is Twitter's decision to allow Marjorie Taylor Greene's transphobic tw...' *trans flag covering mouth*"
Auron MacIntyre on Twitter - "That’s a very interesting photo for your pro-censorship article"
Blue Lives Matter - Posts | Facebook - "Facebook has started cutting our reach by 99% to all articles posted in the past 14 hours. We don't know what they're doing to our page now. We're on Twitter and LinkedIn, and have a newsletter on our website if you don't want FB to shut you out from seeing our content. Unfortunately, we can't give you the links to any of those things or FB will cut the reach on this post too."
Sargon of Akkad - Posts | Facebook - "I can't think of a better reason not to let Facebook be the arbiter of truth then the fact their bot thinks saying coronavirus came from china is false."
Facebook sparks controversy by naming Brotherhood figure to oversight board - "The name of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Yemeni Nobel Prize winner Tawakkol Karman stood out as an odd addition to the list of Facebook's first 20 oversight board members... Radicalisation experts believe that by choosing Karman for the influential role, Facebook failed to recognise the link between the Muslim Brotherhood's ideological advocacy and extremist activity. A number of countries in the region have branded the Brotherhood a terrorist organisation. The terrorist links of the organisation are under investigation in several Western nations. A number of al-Qaeda leaders have initially been active with the Muslim Brotherhood... ironically, a clarification it issued last September seemed to discount the link between terrorism and extremist ideology."
Paul Joseph Watson on Twitter - "Joe Rogan has confirmed that YouTube censorship, particularly with regard to the platform deleting content by doctors challenging the official coronavirus narrative, is partly what prompted him to move his podcast to Spotify."
Why Facebook Would Have Demoted History's Most Remarkable Content - "Demoted: news articles lacking transparent authorship... Perhaps the most viral piece of content in American history was published anonymously. It was the polemical pamphlet Common Sense, with its plainspoken language, that animated the colonial commoner’s spirit with a fiery sense of independence and revolution. Soon after, a pseudonymous Publius argued voluminously in The Federalist Papers in favor of binding those colonies together in strong nationhood by ratifying the Constitution... The gender-insightful Pride and Prejudice was published anonymously in 1813...
Demoted: links to domains and pages with a high click gap... The idea being, if a publisher has experienced hyper-growth on Facebook but nowhere else, it is likely manipulating Facebook’s News Feed algorithm or its population of users in some unsavory way... Back in the 16th century, a German priest named Martin Luther produced a premium piece of content that attracted viewership overwhelmingly from one channel. In his day, religious media had been distributed exclusively through local bishops networked with the pope. That channel had been uniquely hostile to any content that undermined the established orthodoxy...
Demoted: fact-checked misinformation... You know, for a culture so deeply conflicted about the essence of truth, delegating this most foundational of tasks to robots seems a peculiar move. Like, has no one seen Ex-Machina or Terminator? Or 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Matrix? Or read Minority Report? There is an entire genre of storytelling devoted to this most timely piece of wisdom: beware placing too much trust in the robots. And yet here we are... Early in the 17th century, Galileo Galilei employed the telescope to produce evidence supporting Nicholas Copernicus’s argument that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the solar system. Galileo’s content was flagged as misinformation by an institutional functionary, which led to a committee of experts being assigned to review the matter. Those experts concluded that heliocentrism was a scientific falsity. Any content that suggested otherwise was banned.
Demoted: posts from broadly untrusted news publishers... What about the trustworthiness of the Russian black market publications that sprang up behind the iron curtain and argued for free expression and individual rights at a time when coercive collectivism ruled the day? A community of communist comrades would have found state issued media more trustworthy, of course. And even those citizens who harbored dissenting points of view would be reluctant to respond to surveys honestly for fear of some form of party-sanctioned retaliation. In either case, non-fiction essays from the likes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would have been attributed as untrustworthy and algorithmically suppressed as a result.
It’s not about the quality of information or the shielding of democracy. It’s about preserving the established order of things"
YouTube investigates automatic deletion of comments criticising China Communist party - "YouTube is investigating the apparently automatic removal of comments critical of the Chinese Communist party amid complaints of censorship. The company said the filtering appeared to be “an error” amid a greater reliance on automated systems during the coronavirus pandemic because its human reviewers have been sent home. The inquiry was sparked by media reports on complaints from technology entrepreneur Palmer Luckey. Other Twitter users responded to Luckey’s tweet that they, too, believed comments about the Communist party had been removed. Luckey, a founder of the virtual reality group Oculus who is now works for a defence tech firm, tweeted: “YouTube has deleted every comment I ever made about the Wumao, an internet propaganda division of the Chinese Communist party,” and suggested the filtering appeared to be a new policy of censorship."
YouTube automatically deletes comments criticising China's Communist Party - "Two other derogatory phrases translating to “communist bandit” and “50-cent party”, are also being deleted shortly after being posted in comments sections under YouTube videos. The "50-cent" reference comes from the allegation that online propagandists are paid ¥0.50 (£0.06) per post. Google has faced criticism for plans to operate in China, as doing so would mean it would have to censor its search engine and other services to comply with the law. It began testing a censored search engine, Project Dragonfly, to see if it could comply with state censorship. After its existence was reported by the Information, it was dismantled."
Facebook - "So I found out the last post that got “flagged” for me & took away my live-streams & possibly more. It was my BOOK REPORT video on the book “How To Lie With Statistics”. This book was even on Bill Gates’ reading list a few years ago as a must read. Facebook did not give me a reason, how long the ban is, their customer service won’t respond to me & they have made it impossible to get in touch with a human. Banning a BOOK REVIEW because the book isn’t ideal for their current agenda? They have to know that they have become the AUTHORITARIAN, ORWELLIAN TYRANTS of society. Shame on them. Do they have no soul? You can take my live-streams away. You can take 90% of my monetization. You can take it all. But it will never make you right. You are WRONG & you are CENSORING BOOKS."
Twitter’s purge of the anti-woke satirists - "Among those purged was Titiana McGrath, the woke caricature created by comedian and spiked columnist Andrew Doyle... Titania was not the only victim. The Babylon Bee, a US satire site, was also temporarily locked out, though it has since been restored. Other satirical accounts – Jarvis Dupont, Guy Verhoftwat, Tolerance Police, Liberal Larry and Sir Lefty Farr-Right QC – all remain suspended... All the accounts did was make fun of wokeness. But it seems virtue-signalling Silicon Valley nerds can’t take a joke. Apparently, this kind of comedy needs to be silenced. Ironically, Twitter’s purge of the anti-woke satirists is a complete vindication of their work. In banning those who make fun of wokeness and criticise its censoriousness, Twitter has made it even clearer how authoritarian that wokeness is."
Exclusive: Facebook targets harmful real networks, using playbook against fakes - ""A lot of the time problematic behavior will look very close to social movements," said Evelyn Douek, a Harvard Law lecturer who studies platform governance. "It's going to hinge on this definition of harm ... but obviously people's definitions of harm can be quite subjective and nebulous.""
Facebook - "Anyone who thinks Facebook "fact checking" is effective resides on the left side of the bell curve. For one, the system is completely unable to decipher context, and might even punish you for warning about fake news by pushing you out of others news feeds. (2nd screenshot shows where I was warning about Russian fake news. 1st screenshot shows Facebook's threat (see last para).)"
Federal court rules Big Tech has no 'freewheeling First Amendment right to censor' - "A federal appeals court upheld a Texas law on Friday that seeks to curb censorship by social media platforms. The ruling, a major victory for Republicans who charge companies like Twitter and Facebook are limiting free speech, is a step in a major legal battle that could end up at the Supreme Court. The lawsuit is challenging HB 20, a Texas bill signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott that regulates social media platforms with more than 50 million monthly users, which includes Google, Facebook and Twitter, and says they cannot censor or limit users’ speech based on viewpoint expression. In his opinion, Federal Judge Andrew S. Oldham of the Fifth Circuit said the platforms argued for "a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment" that "buried somewhere in the person’s enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech." "Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say""
Freedom of speech means you are free to censor others, apparently
PayPal backs down | The Spectator - "PayPal told me it had permanently closed all three accounts and appeals in all three cases had been unsuccessful. It couldn’t quite decide why it had closed the accounts – it alternated between telling me I’d breached its policy about not promoting ‘hate, violence or racial intolerance’ and telling newspapers my accounts had been closed because I was spreading ‘Covid-19 misinformation’ – but it had definitely decided to close them. Now, apparently, I’m not guilty of any of these sins and my accounts were just under ‘review’. After ‘input’ from its ‘customers and stakeholders’ it has decided I’m kosher after all. So what’s happened? I’ve received thousands of emails and messages from people telling me they’ve closed their PayPal accounts in solidarity, so that may be the ‘input’ the company is referring to. Another reason may be because the company’s efforts to cancel me have been universally condemned across the British media. Last week, Danny Kruger MP asked a question about it in parliament and on Sunday a letter was sent to Jacob Rees-Mogg by 42 peers and MPs urging the Business Secretary to hold PayPal to account. It now looks as though a Bill currently going through parliament will be amended to make it illegal for financial services to engage in this kind of political censorship in future. It goes without saying that I won’t be using PayPal’s services again. I made the mistake of trusting PayPal when I set up the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic, embedding its software into our payment processing systems. Given what I know now – that it can demonetise you on a whim, seemingly without any proper justification – I’m not going to make that mistake twice. Maybe if PayPal restores the accounts of all the other people and organisations it has deplatformed for political reasons, and promises not to do anything like that again, I might reconsider. In the meantime, I will still be devoting all my energies to lobbying the government to pass a law reining in companies like PayPal so other people with non-woke political views don’t have to endure what I’ve been put through."
I Got Permanently Banned From Using PayPal For Having The Wrong Opinions - "I received notification from PayPal that I am permanently banned from using their services because I did not create a “safe community,” and my account was “inconsistent” with their User Agreement... I was never made aware that I had done anything wrong. I was surprised to find out that they would not be telling me specifically what I did that was inconsistent with their User Agreement, or how it made anyone unsafe... My Venmo account has also been closed since PayPal owns Venmo"
PayPal and ADL's plan to deplatform conservatives will not result in less 'hate' - "The news that PayPal will work with the Anti-Defamation League on a new project to “fight extremism and hate through the financial industry” is a genuinely terrifying indication that our political leaders have absolutely no grip on the reality of extremism, and are clueless to how the political persecution of perfectly normal Americans is dividing society and pushing people to extremes. With the ADL’s broad definition of “extremist” and PayPal’s clear willingness to deplatform right-wing activists who have committed no crimes, this program should be of concern to everybody—and not just because no person wants to lose access to easy online payments. The danger this project poses is much more serious than that, as it risks driving genuinely extreme groups further underground, and through its plan to share information with lawmakers in Washington, DC, reveals our political leaders’ dangerous “whack-a-mole” strategy of countering extremism without ever addressing the root causes of it. Should this “research effort” ultimately become a tool to financially deplatform people who fit the ADL’s definition of “extremist,” genuinely extreme groups will become increasingly difficult to track and the political persecution of law-abiding conservatives or anti-leftist groups will assist with the continued division of society along ideological lines. As somebody with a background in extreme politics, I know that this is precisely what drives the resentment that sits at the root of genuine far-right extremism... In both the US and the UK, genuine far right extremism is in large part a reaction to combination of factors: a negligent and vengeful political class, willing to either ignore or demonise working-class, white people, compounded by a complicit media that parrots the line that the people neglected by the politicians are in fact the oppressors, and a violent left-wing activism designed to coerce and terrify those who think the wrong way into either staying quiet or actively complying with their agenda. The intention of sharing information obtained through this project with other financial institutions is to cut off conservatives and non-leftists from online financial services. It is an effort to coerce or scare people into compliance, and to punish those who do not comply. Switching off somebody’s access to online financial services in 2021 is like denying someone access to a brick and mortar bank in 1980. It is not merely a minor inconvenience. Given that this information will also be shared with lawmakers in Washington, DC, we must also be conscious of the very real possibility that it will be used to advance divisive political goals. If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hyper-partisan January 6 Committee is anything to go by, it’s clear at this point that the Democrats in Washington do not care about accurately portraying the nature of extremism in the United States. If they can ignore $2 billion in damage caused by left-wing activists in one year, but compare a right-wing riot to 9/11 the next year, how can we have faith in those politicians to use that information to counter extremism—or at least, to counter it effectively?... If PayPal, the ADL, or the Democrats genuinely want to create a society free of “hate,” where people don’t judge one another based on race, where community relations are positive and people have equal opportunities, then it is in their interest to stop stoking the fire and to understand that their actions are causing people to react, and sometimes in the worst ways."
OTOH, if your aims are nakedly political in the first place...