Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line in Censorship - "Almost immediately upon publication, pro-Biden journalists created a climate of extreme hostility and suppression toward the Post story, making clear that any journalist even mentioning it would be roundly attacked. For the crime of simply noting the story on Twitter (while pointing out its flaws), New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman was instantly vilified to the point where her name, along with the phrase “MAGA Haberman,” were trending on Twitter. (That Haberman is a crypto-Trump supporter is preposterous for so many reasons, including the fact that she is responsible for countless front-page Times stories that reflect negatively on the president; moreover, the 2016 Clinton campaign considered Haberman one of their most favorable reporters). The two Silicon Valley giants saw that hostile climate and reacted... As Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce put it, “Facebook limiting distribution is a bit like if a company that owned newspaper delivery trucks decided not to drive because it didn’t like a story. Does a truck company edit the newspaper? It does now, apparently.”... That actions by gigantic corporations are constitutional does not mean that they are benign. State censorship is not the only kind of censorship. Private-sector repression of speech and thought, particularly in the internet era, can be as dangerous and consequential. Imagine, for instance, if these two Silicon Valley giants united with Google to declare: henceforth we will ban all content that is critical of President Trump and/or the Republican Party, but will actively promote criticisms of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Would anyone encounter difficultly understanding why such a decree would constitute dangerous corporate censorship? Would Democrats respond to such a policy by simply shrugging it off on the radical libertarian ground that private corporations have the right to do whatever they want? To ask that question is to answer it... It has been astonishing to watch Democrats over the last twenty-four hours justify this censorship on the grounds that private corporations are entitled to do whatever they want. Not even radical free-market libertarians espouse such a pro-corporate view. Even the most ardent capitalist recognizes that companies that wield monopoly or quasi-monopoly power have an obligation to act in the public interest, and are answerable to the public regarding whether they are doing so... both Facebook and Twitter receive substantial, unique legal benefits from federal law, further negating the claim that they are free to do whatever they want as private companies. Just as is true of Major League Baseball — which is subject to regulation by Congress as a result of the antitrust exemption they enjoy under the law — these social media companies receive a very valuable and particularized legal benefit in the form of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from any liability for content published on their platforms, including defamatory material or other legally proscribed communications. No company can claim such massive, unique legal exemptions from the federal law and then simultaneously claim they owe no duties to the public interest and are not answerable to anyone. To advocate that is a form of authoritarian corporatism: simultaneously allowing tech giants to claim legally conferred privileges and exemptions while insisting that they can act without constraints of any kind... Twitter claimed that the Post article violates its so-called “Hacked Materials Policy”... But that standard, if taken seriously and applied consistently, would result in the banning from the platform of huge amounts of the most important and consequential journalism. After all, a large bulk of journalism is enabled by sources providing “content obtained without authorization” to journalists, who then publish it. Indeed, many of the most celebrated and significant stories of the last several decades — the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder video and war logs, the Snowden reporting, the Panama Papers, the exposés from the Brazil Archive we reported over the last year — relied upon publication of various forms of “hacked materials” provided by sources. The same is true of the DNC and Podesta emails that exposed corruption and forced the 2016 resignation of the top five officials of the Democratic National Committee... why is Twitter not blocking access to the ongoing New York Times articles that disclose the contents of President Trump’s tax returns, the unauthorized disclosure of which is a crime? Why did those platforms not block links to the now-notorious Rachel Maddow segment where she revealed details about one of Trump’s old tax returns on the ground that it was “content obtained without authorization”? Or what about the virtually daily articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and others that explicitly state they are publishing information that the source is unauthorized to disclose: how does that not fall squarely within the banning policy as Twitter defined it yesterday? Worse still, why does Twitter’s “hacking” policy apply to the New York Post story at all? While the Post’s claims about how these emails were obtained are dubious at best, there is no evidence — unlike the award-winning journalism scoops referenced above — that they were obtained by virtue of “hacking” by a source. Facebook’s rationale for suppression — that it needs to have its “fact checking” partners verify the story before allowing it to be spread — poses different but equally alarming dangers. What makes Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company competent to “fact check” the work of other journalists? Why did Facebook block none of the endless orgy of Russiagate conspiracy theories from major media outlets that were completely unproven if not outright false?... Twitter is not opposed to hacked materials and Facebook is not opposed to dubiously sourced stories. They are opposed to such things only when such stories anger powerful factions. When those power centers are the ones disseminating such stories, they will continue to have free rein to do so... To observe that those who are cheering for this today because they happen to like this particular outcome are being short-sighted and myopic is to woefully understate the case. The only people who should want to live in a world where Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos have a stranglehold on what can be said and heard are those whose actions are devoted to the perpetuation of their power and who benefit from their hegemony."
From 2020, on the Hunter Biden NY Post story
Naturally, the left didn't learn their lesson and cheered Nigel Farage's de-banking in 2023
Meme - "Rare photography of Meta Facebook content moderation algorithm elaborately deciding which posts violate the community guidelines. *chimpanzee with 2 dice*"
Meme - "Listen. And understand. That Facebook A.I. bot is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are banned."
Meme - "HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR AND VALENTINE'S!!!
"X-MEN '97 Official Trailer"
"Your content couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards"
Woke big tech has launched a fatal crusade against free speech - "Even before AI, staffers at Google, Facebook and Twitter share what could be likened to an ideological hivemind, curating content in a way some conservative lawmakers have suggested is discriminatory towards Right-wing views. Former employees have suggested these companies algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups”, even though programmers often have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express dissenting but legitimate views. Most dangerous of all, these big tech firms have become giant oligopolies with almost unlimited funds and a net worth greater than Canada, Russia, South Korea, Australia and Spain combined. Nor can we expect these firms to be tempered by traditional market capitalism. Google and Apple account for nearly 90 per cent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft by itself controls 90 per cent of all operating system software. Perhaps more ominously, two-thirds of the world’s cloud services – essential for AI – are controlled by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. These geeky bad boys are essentially capturing not just the means of communication but control of content as well. They are becoming what Aldous Huxley called “a scientific caste system”. People like Jeff Bezos may see this as the “beginning of a Golden Age”, but it seems closer to what the French analyst Gaspard Koenig describes as “digital feudalism”. AI looms as a force multiplier for these oligarchs. Already nearly two-thirds of US adults now get their news through social media like Facebook or Google. This is even more true among millennials, soon to be the nation’s largest voting bloc. Although the Gemini project is now being re-evaluated, we inevitably face AI bots that are more subtle and persuasive, particularly for a generation that reads little and knows even less. Rather than an upsurge a new plucky start-up, AI technology seems better suited to expanding the oligarch’s stranglehold... The inherent dangers of the AI data revolution are clear. China already employs a digitally enabled “social credit” system to track citizens’ activities. There’s even an app that rewards people for reporting signs of dissent to authorities, such as illegal publications. Christina Larson, a MIT researcher, asked the right question: “Who needs democracy when you have data?”... As we saw from Meta’s (the parent company of Facebook) handling of allegations over Hunter Biden’s laptop, Silicon Valley has the power to shape potentially election-defining news stories. As they gain more access to our health, financial and personal data, our new controllers reach for ever more soft power. It’s hardly scaremongering to suggest that hyper-monitoring could create a situation wherein people could be arrested on the basis of algorithmic predictions of violence: such a proposal has already been championed by the Trudeau regime in Canada, a nation once renowned as a staunch defender of civil rights."
Last chance to end the tech tyranny - The Spectator World - "What would Adam Smith think of cancel culture? Many advocates of banning books now hide behind a veil of free-market purity: If Amazon bans a book, it’s not really banned because the online megalomart is, a private company. But it controls an outright majority of book sales in the United States, and even that remarkable measure may underestimate the power Jeff Bezos’s company wields over individual titles. Bestsellers can be found elsewhere perhaps, but most books have few other outlets. So Amazon doesn’t ban books. It just makes them much harder to buy and read. If a private company chooses to do that, who are you to complain? If you’re a reader, you’ll just have to hunt elsewhere — though you might find other large retailers, such as Walmart, have adopted the same corporate censorship policies. If you’re the author or publisher of a megacorp-disapproved text, you still have nothing to complain about: can’t you always start your own bookstore?... Thank God for Barnes & Noble, who deserve the thanks of all who still believe we should be able to read what we want, not just what the nannies and commissars of corporate America deem fit for our eyes. And if Barnes & Noble goes bankrupt or succumbs to the censors? Doesn’t matter — just start another bookstore chain. Fine idea, except that businesses, and not just books, are getting canceled by Big Tech. Parler, for example, was an attempt to start a new social network. Conservatives feeling smothered by Twitter’s abridgments of political speech were willing to overlook Parler’s technical inadequacies, so eager were they for an alternative. The business found a niche. But Big Tech’s market-dominant players decided to snuff out the upstart they could not control... The lesson was clear: if you adopt free-speech policies that the tech titans dislike, they will converge to shut you down and shut you up. Adam Smith staunchly defended private enterprise, but he warned in The Wealth of Nations that ‘people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ The tech companies that control and constrain online communications in the United States are indeed ‘a conspiracy against the public’, not to raise prices — though that warrants a closer look — but to impose their politics and morals on everyone. Monopoly is not the relevant category here. The Big Tech cartel is not the sole purveyor of its products, but its members have such a dominant position in online communications as to threaten both individual liberty and open public discourse. Even the most traditional medium of First Amendment freedoms of the written word, the newspaper, is now a creature of the tech cartel, as Google controls the web advertising on which for-profit print publications depend. Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post is an apt metaphor for the relationship between the tech oligarchy-oligopoly and the press as a whole. Breaking up the tech companies might not be the answer, however: a cartel with a dozen members can be just as ruthless as one with only five or six. When all the players follow the same politicized hiring, management and human-resources policies, their intuitive collusion is self-reinforcing: to be canceled by one tech giant is to be blacklisted by all. Big Tech does not truly compete. This poses a problem for conventional economic thinking: such non-competition has a psychological aim rather than a commercial one. The tech cartel has the private business world’s freedom from public accountability, yet it commands more wealth than whole nations and has a singular chokehold on published speech in the US. All this unchecked power serves a moral vision as comprehensive as that of any religion. For Big Tech, as for religions of old, error has no rights. And the public has no right to know or debate anything — not on Lord Bezos’s estate. The Democratic party benefits politically from the suppression of speech online and the privileging of a single ideological point of view. Yet it is far from certain that Republicans understand what is required to restore the intellectual commons. There’s an obvious contradiction between GOP complaints about censorship and calls on the right for stricter libel laws and new ways to sue tech companies for what gets said on their platforms. But if policy remedies are elusive, the cultural prerequisites of the cure are not: Americans must understand that their freedom to read what they choose and to think for themselves is opposed by an ideology that calls itself progressive and liberal, and by a concentration of unaccountable power over the tongue and mind unlike anything this country has encountered before. A new philosophical critique of this power and of the commissars who wield it must be devised, a critique as radical as the thought of Adam Smith was in 1776."
Twitter Censors Conservatives, But Won’t Ban Pedophiles. - "Even an account that was just selling MAGA winter hats just got suspended…. But it gets better, despite the fact Twitter won’t delete even some of the worst pedophile profiles….they did manage to censor and hand out ban hammers to people that spoke out AGAINST them…"
From 2018
Global Government Affairs on X - "We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria. Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society. We will work to restore access for all those in Nigeria who rely on Twitter to communicate and connect with the world. #KeepitOn"
From 2021. Ironic, given how many people they blocked
Glenn Greenwald on X - "The most under-reported and under-discussed story of 2023: a federal district court judge, upheld by a unanimous appellate panel, found the Biden WH and FBI committed one of the gravest attacks on the 1st Am in decades by coercing Big Tech to censor dissent online."
FBI, White House likely coerced social media platforms: Appeals court
This won't stop left wingers from denying the facts and claiming that the government flagging material to companies is just keeping in line with the companies' policies
Don Wolt on X - "An MIT team the govt funded to create AI censorship tools claimed people dedicated to sacred texts & American founding documents were more susceptible to “disinformation” because they “often focused on reading a wide array of primary sources and performing their own synthesis.”"
AI Censorship Targets People Who Read Primary Sources - "NewsGuard announced last week it’s using AI to automatically prevent American citizens from seeing information online that challenges government and corporate media claims about elections ahead of the 2024 voting season. “[P]latforms and search engines” including Microsoft’s Bing use NewsGuard’s “ratings” to stop people from seeing disfavored information sources, information, and topics in their social media feeds and online searches. Now censorship is being deployed not only by humans but also by automated computer code, rapidly raising an Iron Curtain around internet speech. Newsguard rates The Federalist as a “maximum” risk for publishing Democrat-disapproved information, even though The Federalist accurately reports major stories about which NewsGuard-approved outlets continually spread disinformation and misinformation. Those have already included the Russia-collusion hoax, the Brett Kavanaugh rape hoax, numerous Covid-19 narratives, the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the deadly 2020 George Floyd riots. NewsGuard directs online ad dollars to corporate leftist outlets and away from independent, conservative outlets. The organization received federal funding for developing these internet censorship tools that now include artificial intelligence... Numerous federal agencies are funding AI censorship tools, including the U.S. Department of State, the subject of a December lawsuit from The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas. The report last month from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reveals shocking details about censorship tools funded by the National Science Foundation, one of hundreds of federal agencies... “In my dream world,” censorship technician Scott Hale told NSF grantmakers, people like him would use aggregate data of the speech censored on social media to develop “automated detection” algorithms that immediately censor banned speech online, without any further human involvement. “Misinformation” that NSF-funded AI scrubs from the internet includes “undermining trust in mainstream media,” the House report says. It also works to censor election and vaccine information the government doesn’t like. One censorship tool taxpayers funded through the NSF “sought to help train the children of military families to help influence the beliefs of military families,” a demographic traditionally more skeptical of Democrat rule. Federal agencies use nonprofits they fund as cutouts to avoid constitutional restraints that prohibit governments from censoring even false speech. As Foundation for Freedom Online’s Director Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson and journalist Jan Jekielek in recent interviews, U.S. intelligence agencies are highly involved in censorship, using it essentially to control the U.S. government by controlling public opinion. A lawsuit at the Supreme Court, Murthy v. Missouri, could restrict federal involvement in some of these censorship efforts. Yet, as Benz noted, corporate media have long functioned as a propaganda mouthpiece for U.S. spy agencies. That relationship has continued as social media displaced legacy media in controlling public opinion. Today, dozens of highly placed Big Tech staff are current or former U.S. spy agency employees. Many of them manage Big Tech’s censorship efforts in conjunction with federal agency employees. Nonprofit censorship cutouts use “tiplines” to target speech even on private messaging apps like WhatsApp. AI tools “facilitate the censorship of speech online at a speed and in a manner that human censors are not capable,” the House report notes. A University of Wisconsin censorship tool the federal government funded lets censors see if their targets for information manipulation are getting their messages and gauge in real-time how their targets respond. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team the federal government funded to develop AI censorship tools described conservatives, minorities, residents of rural areas, “older adults,” and veterans as “uniquely incapable of assessing the veracity of content online,” says the House report. People dedicated to sacred texts and American documents such as “the Bible or the Constitution,” the MIT team said, were more susceptible to “disinformation” because they “often focused on reading a wide array of primary sources, and performing their own synthesis.” Such citizens “adhered to deeper narratives that might make them suspicious of any intervention that privileges mainstream sources or recognized experts.” “Because interviewees distrusted both journalists and academics, they drew on this practice [of reading primary sources] to fact check how media outlets reported the news,” MIT’s successful federal grant application said. People who did this were less likely to believe the federal government’s propaganda, making them prime obstacles to government misinformation."
Critical thinking is dangerous
Clearly, this is not a violation of the First Amendment, because free speech doesn't mean hate speech or disinformation
Meme - "You" *standing in shower*
"Fun on Facebook" *soap on floor*
"Community Standards" *someone standing behind you*
Malaysia outraged at Meta takedown of media’s Facebook posts on PM’s Hamas meeting - "“I condemn Meta’s actions of removing posts, especially since they were in relation to the Prime Minister’s official visit to Qatar,” Communications Minister, Fahmi Fadzil, who is also government spokesperson, told a regular briefing. “What I regret is that these actions were taken by an organisation based in the United States, and it’s clear that they do not respect the freedom of media outlets in using their platform.”"
Malaysia to take legal action against Meta over ‘undesirable’ content
Malaysia Orders Meta, TikTok to Formulate Plan for ‘Harmful’ Content
Ironic.
Deva Hazarika on X - "What all the free speech and moderation discussion makes abundantly clear is many people’s principles boil down to amplify content they agree with and restrict content they disagree with"
Wiceboy_Photography on X - "Social media be like: "What's on your mind?" then ban you for saying it. 🤣🫠"
i/o on X - "Something just occurred to me: When I started out on Twitter years ago (with a previous account), I was among the first people to candidly tweet about the racial IQ gaps. When I did, my replies would instantly fill up with angry people (including academics) who would accuse me of spreading misinformation even though I'd link to well-established scientific findings and data. Hardly any lefty accounts seemed to believe that these gaps even existed. Now this never happens. It seems that everyone on social media is now aware of the gaps. All it took was a few people (who were willing to get suspended every once in a while) to start posting this information and other accounts to retweet it."
This is why left wingers hate Elon Musk so much
Meme - Woman on bus 1: "What happened?"
Woman on bus 2: "I don't know, he saw his phone and then cried"
"poor boy, he surely have received bad news"
"Maybe semeone died"
"You can't post or comment for 30 days. This is because 7 of your previous posts didn't follow our Community Standards."
Reddit Lies on X - "Every "hot" post on r/Politics right now is either glazing Democrats or demonizing Republicans. Literally. Every. Single. Post. It's difficult to describe just how insanely biased Reddit is."
House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 on X - "Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:
1. Biden-Harris Admin "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans.
2. Facebook censored Americans.
3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Big win for free speech."
Melissa Chen on X - "As some of you know, as early as April 2020, I had floated the sensible opinion that the lab leak hypothesis should not be so handedly dismissed on Facebook, citing references from elsewhere. My account was suspended and the post itself was removed. This was more than a year before the public destigmatization would occur (thanks to Jon Stewart in June 2021), suddenly depriving this viewpoint of its cooties and conspiratorial stench. It was also successfully-coded as a racist trope. Only God knows how on earth they managed to do such a thing given that the alternative hypothesis (Chinese people eating bat soup) was far more racist. Oh wait, now I get it! This worked primarily because of our stupidity to conform, combined with widespread CENSORSHIP on social media platforms so that only approved narratives could percolate. In the time since, the lab leak story has proved to be more than plausible (even the US DoE concludes as such). It’s hard to think about the counter-factual but please for a moment, just imagine that Twitter/Facebook did not comply with the Biden-Harris admin request. Instead of taking 18 months relying on someone the MSM had anointed with sainthood (St. Stewart) to publicly discuss it, many people would’ve been openly talking about the possibility of a lab leak as early as I was, circa April 2020. Citizen journalists and researchers could collaborate and find each other more easily. Maybe the public pressure would’ve allowed virologists to speak their minds knowing there was widespread support of this view, and not have been pressured by Fauci to change their minds. Maybe some public pressure would’ve put media and government pressure on Fauci earlier on, rather than give the very culprits - the people who went around the government policy on GoF research -the time to regroup, the time to censor our posts, the time to cover up their own tracks, and in the process give China time and space to scrub the seafood market clean, stall on conducting an independent inquiry (which they refused for more than a year and when they finally did the investigators were hand-picked), and all involved to hide the evidence (at the Wuhan Institute of Virology). Australia had asked for an independent investigation and instead was slapped with trade tariffs and other economic retaliatory measures. We have not fully accounted for the consequences of Meta’s speech suppression. But it is absolutely not trivial because it likely prevented us from knowing the truth about one of the biggest coverups in our lifetime."
Meme - "l believe we must continue to stand for free expression." - Mark Zuckerberg
"False Information. Checked by independent fact-checkers. See Why"
Zuckerberg says he regrets caving to White House pressure on content - "Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was “wrong” and he plans to push back if it happens again... Zuckerberg also expressed regret for Meta’s downplaying of content related to coverage by the New York Post about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election that the FBI warned may have been rooted in a Russian disinformation operation."
Weird. We kept being told that this never happened
Meme - "Warning. Although this information is factually correct, it makes Democrats look bad.
It appears you are attempting to view something that may cast Democrats in a bad light. Therefore we blocked you from seeing it. Now back to work, comrade.
Go Back
Report to the thought police"