Even MPs are being censored by Big Tech - "Few platforms have been as censorious as YouTube. The video-sharing giant’s policies on ‘medical misinformation’ prevent users from uploading content that contravenes the gospel truths of the World Health Organisation. This policy was imposed despite the WHO’s own litany of scientific errors during the pandemic, including its one-time insistence that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of Covid. YouTube’s policy quashes freedom of inquiry and inhibits people’s ability to have open conversations about matters of public policy. Earlier this week, YouTube removed a video of veteran MP David Davis that was filmed and uploaded by Big Brother Watch. Davis was giving a speech on vaccine passports at our fringe event at this month’s Conservative Party conference. In the course of his speech, Davis opposed vaccine mandates and vaccine passports while praising the vaccine itself. Soon after the video’s release, YouTube notified Big Brother Watch that the video of Davis’s speech had contravened its community standards, accusing him of spreading ‘medical misinformation’. This is chilling. If rights groups like Big Brother Watch and democratically elected politicians like Davis cannot debate policy in public without being subject to Big Tech censorship, then no one is safe... But instead of standing up for free speech, politicians have mostly demanded more censorship"
Biased NYU 'research' calls claims of censorship against conservatives 'disinformation' - "while the crux of evidence that conservatives are being censored on social media may be anecdotal in absence of reliable studies on the matter, a lack of evidence for a proposition does not amount to evidence against the proposition. Second, even a single study on the matter is not enough, in scientific analysis, to declare a proposition a "falsehood," and certainly not enough to call it "disinformation" when anecdotes can be used to back up a claim. Disinformation is defined as "false information which is intended to mislead," and while one can argue that the claims that conservatives are being censored is overblown or untrue, it would be very difficult to argue that it constitutes an intention to mislead given the various anecdotes of conservatives who have been censored by social media platforms without breaking their rules. Furthermore, the study goes on to excuse the banning of certain high-profile right-wingers from various social media platforms, including former President Donald Trump, which they described as a "reasonable attempts to forestall additional violence." They justified this on the basis that some, more violent Trump supporters had interpreted recent tweets of his as supportive of violence against the government, even though he never made any explicit statement calling for violence, as is the standard set by the first amendment... While the authors of the study may view the social media censorship as justified, it ultimately detracts from their argument that social media companies do not engage in censorship of conservatives... under the framework of this study, banning people from social media for alleging censorship by big tech would not be considered censorship by big tech. If the methodology of this study does not sound questionable already, wait until you hear what the actual methodology is. The study also justifies a number of other notorious examples of social media censorship, most notably of the New York Post's Hunter Biden bombshell which was released in October of last year. The study describes the censorship of the story as a "reasonable decision" as the story itself was "questionable." The authors of the study did not even bother to dispute the actual claims of the study on a factual basis, and these mere dismissals served as their excuses for justifying the censorship of this story... The methodology of this study does not say anything whatsoever about whether conservatives are censored by tech giants... the fact that right-wingers outperform left-wingers in social media engagement does not, in and of itself, disprove claims of censorship. It could simply be that conservatives are better at using social media, or that they are more likely to use it. However, the only thing which can be definitively confirmed by right-wingers outperforming left-wingers in terms of social media engagements is that right-winger outperform left-wingers on social media platforms. No other conclusion can be definitively identified by this fact. I wrote a single empirical research paper while studying in university as an undergraduate economics student, but even I could think of a better methodology to research claims of anti-conservative social media censorship... Of course, the embarrassingly incurious demographic which makes up the bulk of mainstream media journalists parroted the results of the study without question"
The ‘Common Carrier’ Solution to Social-Media Censorship - WSJ - "Even many of Mr. Trump’s supporters concede that Twitter and Facebook owe him no platform—that only the government has a legal obligation to respect the First Amendment. Richard Epstein takes a different view. The gagging of the president by America’s digital behemoths provokes in him a mix of indignation and distress. A professor at the New York University Law School, he is the foremost libertarian legal scholar in the common-law world. (Mr. Epstein, 77, directs NYU’s Classical Liberal Institute, where I am a fellow.)... he’s been struck by the “one-sided” nature of the debate over Mr. Trump’s ban from social media, focusing almost solely on the First Amendment and how it “applies only to Congress and to the states and doesn’t apply to private parties.” Largely absent from the debate, he says, has been the word ““monopoly.”... If they are monopolies—not “an easy question,” Mr. Epstein acknowledges—the common-law rule is that “no private monopoly has the right to turn away customers.” It must take them all on “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms. This principle, which sometimes goes by the acronym Frand, dates back to the writings of Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76), an English jurist... This notion of “rate regulation,” Mr. Epstein says, was incorporated into American law in 1876, when the Supreme Court decided in Munn v. Illinois that the state had the authority to regulate a grain warehouse’s prices. Munn began the development of a body of law concerning “common carriers,” such as railroads, which offer services to the general public for which there is no alternative. In Mr. Epstein’s view, the near-monopoly position of Twitter and Facebook may generate common-carrier obligations... The argument becomes stronger, Mr. Epstein says, “when those who are policing the entry into the networks” make their political preferences clear: “You cannot be both a platform operator and a partisan. Jack Dorsey is not, shall we say, a neutral party.” Mr. Epstein thinks Mr. Zuckerberg is also partisan, but “in a cagey way. He is certainly no Republican, but he is smart enough to mute his hostility relative to, say, Dorsey.” Mr. Epstein has two recommendations for Twitter and Facebook, which he’s sure they won’t follow: “First, they should take the control of access to their networks and give it to somebody who doesn’t care about the outcome. And then, to have a relatively narrow, consistently applied, definition of what counts as violence and threats of force.” In regard to the latter point, Mr. Epstein points to how Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has more than 880,000 Twitter followers, “gets to promise the death of America on his account 20 times a day. All sorts of other zealots get to do that. You can’t select the violence you don’t like from the violence that you do like, or choose to ignore.” Ultimately, Mr. Epstein says, those berating Twitter and Facebook for their abuse of “monopoly power” will lead the market to rebel, as happened when entrepreneurs responded to railroad monopolies by developing spur lines and other alternatives. “And that’s Parler,” he says, “and Gab,” another upstart that is kicking at Mr. Dorsey’s shins. Yet Parler is in a bind. Apple’s refusal to carry its app means that it can’t get onto an iPhone... Mr. Epstein warns of ugly political consequences: “What you’re seeing now is an unwillingness of companies like Twitter and Facebook to tolerate conservative talk on their networks. What you’ll now get is conservative networks and liberal networks, and they won’t overlap.” This will heighten political polarization, as “each group starts to listen to its own, and they get madder and madder about what’s going on.”"
Maybe liberals will take a leaf from the libertarians and use the strict definition of monopoly, and claim social media companies aren't monopolies, and ignore that monopoly power is known to be a bad thing even in the absence of true monopoly
Enforcement update and hard removal of a topic : KotakuInAction - "Going forward there will be a blanket ban on everything "transgender"-related as a topic. Violations of this will result in a removal with a public message from a moderator explaining the issue. No warnings or bans will be issued due to this unless you purposely try to get around automod or violate other rules in the same comment. Recently there has been a lot of admin activity around this topic which has raised the issue for us that we cannot tell which post/comments are fine with admins and which are not. I personally had a comment removed and received a warning from that admin for a comment that had no negative implication about transgender people whatsoever. After reaching out to the admins directly, the response I was given was that "Using slurs for trans women...falls under this policy." Requesting a list of what the admins consider slurs so that we could effectively update automod and our own moderation policies failed to produce any kind of list to operate off of, with essentially scripted replies that were not really related to what I was asking about. With the current enforcement by the admins we have no way of determining how to moderate any discussion on the topic. To protect both the userbase and the subreddit itself we have decided to ban all discussion on the topic. This means anything in any form using words related to transgender anything will be removed by automod"
This is reddit enforcing this, so you can't blame subreddit political bias. Knowing liberals this was most likely deliberate, to have an excuse to ban conservative subreddits
Big Tech’s censorship of talkRADIO is an outrage - "The deletion of talkRADIO’s YouTube channel this morning – reportedly due to its platforming of lockdown-sceptical views – is among the most chilling cases of Big Tech censorship we’ve seen yet. talkRADIO is a mainstream British political radio station, interviewing cabinet ministers on a daily basis, with a sizable social-media presence... That talkRADIO and its output has been memory-holed by YouTube, when it is already stringently regulated by Britain’s own broadcast regulator, Ofcom, makes this even more alarming... That a British broadcaster – which has not to date been reprimanded by Ofcom for its content on Covid and lockdown – now seems to have been caught in the net reminds us that we are in a new phase of Big Tech censorship. Just as with the Hunter Biden case in the run-up to the US election – in which a New York Post exposé was suppressed by Twitter and Facebook, over claims it was ‘misinformation’ – it seems social media is, in effect, extending its censorious writ over older forms of media, which are increasingly reliant on the internet to disseminate their work and make money. Yes, Google and Facebook are private companies. But they also monopolise large parts of what now constitutes the public square. Anyone who is genuinely comfortable with these tech behemoths setting the terms for acceptable debate, deciding even what is true, simply hasn’t been caught in its crosshairs yet. But they will. Censorship once it has been justified can only spread. What began a few years back among Silicon Valley firms as a clampdown on hate speech and genuine misinformation on their platforms has morphed into routine censorship of dissent. Now even of mainstream broadcasters. Those who defend such censorship today give up their right to complain about it tomorrow."
TalkRadio back on YouTube after video platform backtracks
Fact check: Many researchers blamed mosquitoes for malaria in 1900 - ""99% of scientists agreed dirt caused malaria in 1900," reads a June 7 Facebook post that was shared 1,500 times in a week. "Just 2 doctors, Walter Reed and George Goethals, didn't. They thought mosquitos were the culprits. They were right. All the others were wrong.""
CDC - Malaria - About Malaria - History - Laveran and the Discovery of the Malaria Parasite - "Earlier theories were that malaria was caused by bad air (“mala aria” in Italian) from marshlands. However, following the discoveries of Louis Pasteur that most infectious diseases are caused by microbial germs (the “germ theory”), the hypothesis of a bacterial origin of malaria became increasingly attractive. As related in Laveran’s “Treatise On Marsh Fevers” (1884), numerous studies, mostly in Italy but also in the United States, had searched for an infectious agent in marshland soil and incriminated various algae, aquatic protozoa, and bacteria such as Bacillus malariae in Italy. (Protozoa are micro-organisms that are single-celled, with a well-defined nucleus, and without cell walls.)... Laveran continued his work in Algeria. He also visited Italy in 1882, where he looked for the parasite in the air, the water, and the soil of marshlands. That search proved negative, making him suspect that the parasite could be in the body of mosquitoes, which were abundant in that environment. He put forward this hypothesis in his “Treatise on Marsh Fevers” of 1884 and defended it at the International Congress of Hygiene in Budapest (1894). In his 1891 treatise “On Malaria And Its Hematozoon,” he wrote, without giving a reference, that “King, in America, had the idea that mosquitoes played a role in malaria. Laveran’s publications were generally met with skepticism, especially among the Italians and the disciples of Louis Pasteur (except Elie Metchnikoff), who were in favor of a bacterial cause. Later, following his return in 1884 to the Val-de-Grâce School of Military Medicine, Laveran invited Pasteur to visit and see under his microscope the motile, flagellated bodies. Pasteur was immediately convinced (Roux, 1915). It was not until the years 1885-1890 that the parasitic origin of malaria was accepted.”
The "fact check" is slimey. What a surprise
Facebook content reviewers describe stressful work environment: Report - "The Verge described an office where employees cope with intense stress by using drugs and having sex at work. One employee told The Verge he brought a gun to work because he feared retaliation from former employees... Contracted moderators get two 15-minute breaks, one 30-minute lunch and nine minutes of “wellness time” per day, The Verge reported, but much of that time is spent waiting on long lines for the bathroom where three stalls per restroom serve hundreds of employees. Some use these stalls as places to have sex at work to cope with the stress... Others have resorted to lactation rooms, which became such a problem last year that management removed locks from the doors... Some employees used drugs at work to numb the pain, according to the report. Workers described to The Verge regularly smoking marijuana on the job and joking to each other about “drinking to forget.”... The worker said he began to believe some of the conspiracy theories he was exposed to at work, like that 9/11 was not a terrorist attack or that the Las Vegas massacre was committed by multiple gunmen, even though the FBI has said it was committed by one gunman... When The Verge asked a counselor at Cognizant about risks of contractors developing PTSD, the counselor instead said some people can experience “post-traumatic growth,” where trauma victims become stronger."
Facebook Content Moderator: "If Someone's Wearing MAGA Hat, I'm Going to Delete Them for Terrorism" - "Kontakos looked around at her colleagues: "I think we are all doing that." Zach McElroy, the insider, said more than 75% of posts flagged for moderator review supported President Trump and conservative causes and said he would be willing to testify that Facebook is not telling the truth about its political bias."
Twitch adds new ‘Brand Safety Score’ rating for streamers: What does it mean? - "We are exploring ways to improve the experience on Twitch for viewers and creators, including efforts to better match the appropriate ads to the right communities. User privacy is critical on Twitch, and, as we refine this process, we will not pursue plans that compromise that priority. Nothing has launched yet, no personal information was shared, and we will keep our community informed of any updates along the way."
Pop Crave on Twitter - "Julia Fox apologizes to TikTok user after being accused of “condoning sexual assault” for a comment she made about his “mascara” story: “Hey babe I’m so sorry I really thought u were talking about mascara like as in make up.”"
matt on Twitter - "part of the problem with tiktok censorship is that users are making up so many code words to describe serious topics that nobody ever knows what the hell anyone is actually talking about"
Meme - "Tom never deleted posts or banned accounts...Tom gave us everything and we turned our back on him *MySpace*"
Want Facebook to Censor Speech? Be Careful What You Wish For | WIRED - "The lamest of counterarguments to Zuckerberg’s absolutist position is the drearily predictable one of “the First Amendment doesn't apply to companies.” It’s the nitpicky point of the eighth-grade know-it-all. How about I quarter troops from my private army in your house, and when you cite the Third Amendment, I'll reply with “well, they're not government troops,” and see how you feel about it? Concepts like “trespassing” and “privacy” are not mentioned in the Constitution and did not then exist in the form we know today. We have extended the animating spirit of the Third and Fourth Amendments—respecting a person's property and privacy—more broadly, because it's a foundational value we want to see respected everywhere. Ditto the First Amendment: We want companies to embrace it too. Those adopting this line of reasoning, exempting corporations from our topmost civic value, are placing themselves in the absurd position of promoting absolute corporate authority against fundamental values they’d normally extol. Which is precisely the astonishing scene we witnessed last week—the admittedly megalomaniacal CEO of a half-trillion-dollar media behemoth defending free speech to a chorus of journalists who advocated censorship. Ultimately this latest Facebook debate really comes down to how expansive a definition of hate speech we want as a society. Plus, one of the more seismic political shifts happening right now involves millennial views around democracy and free speech. Only a minority of US millennials think it “essential” to live in a democracy, and 40 percent support having the government limit speech that offends minorities. By comparison, more than 70 percent of adults born in the 1930s think democracy is essential, and only 12 percent of adults 70 or over think free speech should be abridged to avoid offense, according to Pew Research and academic studies."
Liberals will dismiss older adults as "boomers" for thinking free speech and democracy and essential
Why Do Progressives Support the Unfettered Use of Private Property? - "while social media companies are indeed private entities, they should nevertheless be unable to regulate non-criminal activity on their platforms for a variety of moral and legal reasons. Two justifications are usually presented for enforcing speech codes on social media, both of which implicate policy aims. The first has to do with combating crime and terrorism. The second involves censoring what has become widely known as “misinformation.” Of these two policy aims, combatting crime seems the more palatable, not least because online activity that amounts to criminal or terrorist behavior is easier to define and identify than misinformation... When does the willful publication of factually disputable content become sanctionable as misinformation rather than simply being wrong? The answer is we don’t know—and neither do the tech companies themselves. The history of Mandatory Palestine is just one of innumerable sensitive political issues prone to controversy, even among experts. Does this mean there aren’t better and worse (or even right and wrong) answers to such questions? No, but it is clear that social media companies are ill-equipped to arbitrate on questions of fact and shouldn’t impose half-baked orthodoxies onto the public by dismissing unpopular or disputable content as “misinformation.” Even if a piece of information or an argument enjoys widespread assent, strong ideas do not need an authority to bolster them—these ideas and arguments must stand on their own and justify themselves on the basis of their own evidentiary support and logical coherence. The most reliable bulwark against an uninformed populace isn’t top-down information control undertaken by private companies, but the protection of the free exchange of all ideas and questions among curious citizens. For the sake of this discussion, let us grant that social media platforms are in fact private companies rather than “functionally public places.” Are these companies therefore able to do whatever they like with their private property? In other property contexts, such a suggestion would be absurd. Owners of real property know that both contractual covenants and statutes can restrict freedom of use. Just because property is privately held, that doesn’t mean the owner can use it in any way he likes. Restrictive covenants and zoning laws, for example, limit the use of property in a number of ways... There are also common law limitations on the use of private property when the rights of other property owners or the general public are encroached upon, like when a property owner maintains a nuisance. Finally, the free use of private property is restricted by laws governing landlord-tenant relationships—renters’ rights laws have broadened in recent decades across the US, and rental agreements prevent landlords from evicting tenants arbitrarily... it is unlikely progressives would be as strident in their support for social media companies’ unfettered use of their property if speech codes were being enforced in the other direction."
Elon Musk buying Twitter showed that the author was right
Should Tech Companies Be Liable for Content - "Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996... is more than a quarter of a century old. It is literally “web 1.0” and was written prior to the social media revolution. Google itself was created in 1998, two years after this law passed. The first blog was created in 1994, but blogs were not popular until later. WordPress, the most popular blog platform, was created in 2003. Twitter was created in 2006, and Facebook in 2004... Arguably, however, the most significant change that happened to social media after this law was passed was the development of algorithms that promote certain types of content over others. Social media platforms are now anything but passive providers of space for third party content. They play an active role in promoting content. They aren’t exactly editors who decide what to publish or not publish, but the effect of their algorithms can be almost the same. Content can be invisible or viral depending on their algorithms. This is very much not like a phone company or internet service provider. Imagine after a phone call and operator gets on and says, “Hey, how would you like to call this person,” trying to jack up your long-distance bill (remember those), or promoting a phone chat line. What if that phone chat line specifically promoted by the phone company provided a dubious service, or was meant to indoctrinate people into a terrorist organization? Is the phone company liable then? Social media tech giants are not just passive platforms. They have a tremendous amount of control over not just which content is allowed on their platforms, but h0w it is promoted and spread. At the very least we need to rethink whether a blanket shield not only for the content on their platform but for the behavior of the companies themselves is appropriate."
Facebook blocks Tan Chuan-Jin - why its metaverse will fail - "the Speaker of the Parliament of Singapore was blocked from commenting by another Facebook bot for merely thanking commenters wishing him well on his birthday. He was also informed that his activity “didn’t follow Community Standards on spam”. Really?... If your top brass and HR are so useless they can’t hire and organise — after 20 years in business — proper developer teams fixing rather basic bugs on a flat website that people use to comment on posts, images and videos, how could they possibly build you teams to produce something inordinately more complex, that has never been done before? It’s, therefore, no surprise that the end result of spending US$10 billion in two years was a widely ridiculed demo like the one below. As a result, Horizon Worlds, Meta’s fundamental VR app, is not gaining but bleeding users. It reportedly lost 100,000 within six months, by October last year — or more than a third of the 300,000 it boasted about in February... Nobody seems to care about the users, so it’s no surprise that it’s been losing them to alternative platforms like TikTok. Even Instagram, acquired by Facebook 10 years ago, has barely evolved beyond what it started with, merely adding some features (like video, Stories etc) only when competitors deployed them, spooking Zuckerberg and his clueless henchmen into action. After all, the only thing that Facebook ever really developed was the timeline that sorts and feeds you updates from your friends and pages you follow. "
If you post too many comments (even thanking people wishing you happy birthday) or make too many reactions, you get blocked. But some naive people still think that the zucc is fine
Meme - "Monopoly Facebook Edition *all Go To Jail*"
Meme - "IF IT CAN BE DESTROVED BY THE TRUTH, IT DESERVES TO BE DESTROYED BY THE TRUTH"
"Missing Context"
"This crap is why no one pays attention to Facebook "Fact Checkers." The overzealous whack jobs "fact checked" a cartoon. They fact checked a cartoon that made no references to anything to fact check against but the opinion of the one that add the text to the cartoon. The cartoon is Linus from Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic strip saying, "If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth." No attribution is given. They can't fact check it agains Covid. They can't fact check it against Biden. They decided to claim that this may or may not be a Carl Sagan quote. Carl Sagan is not mentioned ANYWHERE in the post."
WaPo fact-checker is fact-checked himself by Twitter's community notes on Alvin Bragg and George Soros - "Noted Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler was fact-checked himself by Twitter community notes on his clarification on whether George Soros "funds" Alvin Bragg. Kessler posted a fact-check analysis on Saturday about the "incendiary claim" by Republicans that left-wing billionaire George Soros helped to fund the Manhattan district attorney’s election campaign in 2021. In his review, Kessler gave Republicans three Pinocchios, calling the claim "slippery" and warning about antisemitic implications... Twitter community notes corrected this fact-check, reporting that Soros did, in fact, donate money to an organization that supported Bragg. "Soros donated $1 million to the Color of Change PAC, the largest individual donation it received in the 2022 election cycle, days after it endorsed Bragg for district attorney and pledged more than $1 million in spending to support his candidacy," the note read. Kessler pushed back, saying that "Twitter trolls" did not read his fact-check... The latest tweet ironically faced another community note from Twitter, correcting Kessler’s claim on the previous note. "The original Community Note does not say that the Color of Change PAC spent the $1 million it originally pledged. Soros donated $1 million to the PAC days after it endorsed Bragg and pledged more than $1 million in spending to support his candidacy," the second community note read... Twitter users fact-checked a tweet from the White House that claimed Social Security checks increased in November. "Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden's leadership," the original tweet read. The note under the tweet read, "Seniors will receive a large Social Security benefit due to the annual cost of living adjustment, which is based on the inflation rate." After the backlash, the White House eventually deleted the tweet."
Who fact checks the fact checkers?
Meme - "Facebook be like "partly false, see why". *click* "Chickens only get eaten when they are fully grown so we rate it partly false.""
Chicken 1: "I'm telling you, they're eating us!"
Chicken 2: "You and your conspiracy theories..."
Chicken 3: "LOL!"
