Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors - "China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?... The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it. When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.” Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies... Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.” It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”... What’s to stop Facebook’s Chinese engineers from delivering their Facebook expertise to Xi Jinping? Globalists thought that engaging with China would make that country more open; I fear it’s making us more restrictive... Yet, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) put it in an email to me, these revelations are yet “another indication that Big Tech is no longer deserving” of statutory protections that render it immune to a publisher’s liabilities. Big Tech critic Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), meanwhile, said “this is all the more reason for the Senate to demand that Mark Zuckerberg — under oath and before the election — give an account of what Facebook has been up to.”"
From 2020
Facebook workers ‘ashamed’ by tech giant’s censorship of Post’s reporting - "“Facebook is almost an arm of the Democratic Party — an arm of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.” So said the former Facebook insider as we sat down for an interview at a Midtown restaurant Friday afternoon. A gloomy rain had left the joint deserted, yet the man across the table from me spoke in hushed tones and looked over his shoulder in between remarks for fear of retaliation. Yet he felt he had to speak out, because staffers are “intentionally trying to swing people further to the left”... To gain access to the Facebook network on Blind, a user must sign up using his or her Facebook work e-mail address. The posters, in other words, are verified Facebook employees (and ex-employees in a few cases). So what do Facebook workers think about the company’s handling of our story? The comments speak for themselves: “[Facebook] employees want Trump to lose,” wrote one user. “If that means rigging [the platform] against him, they don’t care.” The post garnered 29 “likes” from other employees. “I was shocked that Facebook did this,” said another. “We kinda called [brought] this on ourselves. So much for ‘we are not the arbiters of truth.’ ” That comment garnered 15 “likes.” Still other comments: “Facebook bets that Biden wins the election. So an effort to jump on the bandwagon.” “Yeah this one is unconscionable. I’m ashamed.” “Imagine if we censored some leaked Trump stuff. It would be the #1 upvoted question tomorrow for Mark [Zuckerberg company-wide]’s Q&A.” Another employee wrote a detailed critique: “Why do people hate Facebook everywhere? Here’s one reason. Freaking one-sided decision. The comms Twitter account [Andy Stone’s] was definitely left-leaning, and it’s a talking point, as well. No proper response to comms feedback. Don’t want to be the what-if person. But we didn’t have problems circulating leaked Trump tax or any other s–t surrounding Trump or COVID.” “If Trump loses his supporters won’t totally blame the obvious censorship that is happening right now,” wrote one sarcastic employee. “If Biden wins, all those questions will go away? Hell no. In fact, he is better off losing, if he doesn’t want more scrutiny into his son’s ill-gotten gains.” Still another employee predicted starkly: “We’re now begging to be regulated.” Facebook didn’t reply to my request for comment. So could these voices of reason prevail inside the company? The Facebook insider, who shared the Blind comments with me, was pessimistic. “The whole thing,” he said, “is run by super-woke millennials and gen-Xers. This overwhelming majority of people make sure there’s no chance of breaking through the ideological barrier.” As a Facebook employee, the insider told me, “if you’re left-wing, you can say what you want. But if you’re conservative — or even just apolitical — you have to go on this anonymous app” to speak your mind."
From 2020
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "When you're using a search engine that censors politically-inconvenient information or buries it on page 17 of its search results, you should not be surprised that when you type "why censorship is" into a search field you get this Orwellian list of suggestions:"
The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "When you type "why censorship is" into Google search, the majority of suggestions are pro-censorship"
"why censorship is
why censorship is important
why censorship is important in social media
why censorship is
why censorship is required
why censorship is important in schools
why censorship is good in schools
why censorship is not justified
why censorship is important for media"
Cenk Uygur on X - "Hillary Clinton just said on CNN, “we lose total control” if social media content is not more regulated. Exactly! She's accidentally admitting the whole point of their attack on social media. Social media can't be contained and they're losing their grip on power. They hate it!"
BREAKING: Facebook deletes #WalkAway campaign of 500,000 people as social media purge of conservatives continues - "Facebook has banned conservative leader Brandon Straka and removed his #WalkAway campaign on the site, an initiative consisting of over half a million users. Now hundreds of thousands of testimonials related to the movement are gone... Former Democrat and campaign member Karlyn Borysenko tweeted that Instagram just deleted her pictures as well and threatened to delete her account. She was told that several of her posts from Dec. 30 to Jan. 6 violated Instagram's Community Guidelines on violence or dangerous organization."
From 2021
Social media platforms could face fines in Poland for censoring free speech
Poland’s new social media law puts freedom of expression at risk, RSF warns
From 2021. I like how banning censorship threatens freedom of speech. This is like ending voting to save democracy
Rose McGowan calls on big tech companies to ‘stop the censorship’
From 2021
How Big Tech took over - "‘We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.’ These are the words of cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow in his ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, penned in 1996. This bombastic document articulates much of the promise idealists once saw in the internet. Above all, it was supposed to unleash free speech and self-expression beyond anything previously imagined. So central was free speech to the mythos of the online world that when the tech giants we know and fear today began to emerge, turning a once anarchic space into hugely profitable businesses, they often appealed to that very principle. Free speech, for these would-be oligarchs, provided them with some semblance of deeper purpose. In 2012, Twitter’s UK general manager, Tony Wang, famously dubbed the social network ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’. ‘Giving people a voice’ is the somewhat more bloodless formulation preferred by one Mark Zuckerberg when describing the moral mission of his social-media behemoth, Facebook... In its rationale for suspending Trump, Twitter cited a tweet in which he confirmed he would not be attending the inauguration of Joe Biden, saying it could be interpreted as a coded invitation to attack it... The political leanings of Silicon Valley are at this point beyond doubt. An analysis by Wired ahead of the November election found that 95 per cent of donations by employees at the six big tech firms – Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Oracle – went to Joe Biden... From 2016 onwards, a succession of hard-right figures were banned by the big platforms over alleged hate speech, from alt-lite troll Milo Yiannopoulos to anti-Islam thug Tommy Robinson to comical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The old liberal arguments against censoring bigots – that the answer to bad speech is more speech, that censorship only drives hate underground – were dismissed, if indeed they were ever made. Commentators and politicians demanded scalp after scalp. The taste for censorship was insatiable. And as hate-speech policies widened, more respectable voices were caught up in them. One was gender-critical feminist Meghan Murphy, permanently banned from Twitter for the crime of ‘misgendering’ an alleged sex offender. Even amid all this, Big Tech tried to hold to a series of increasingly sketchy lines. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg said, on record and unprompted, that it wasn’t Facebook’s job to censor Holocaust denial, however offensive he as a Jewish man found it. He did not want to rule on what is and isn’t true. When Alex Jones was booted off Facebook that same year, a spokesperson was at pains to say this was over Jones’ alleged ‘hate speech’ and ‘glorification of violence’ – not his madcap claims that the Sandy Hook massacre was a ‘false flag’ or 9/11 was an inside job. But the logic of censorship is always towards more censorship. And Silicon Valley came under increasing political pressure to clamp down on online hate and misinformation, which leading Democrats in the US believe was instrumental to Trump’s election in 2016 – baffled as they are by the prospect that some voters might have simply preferred him to Hillary Clinton... Politicians hauled Zuckerberg et al before Congressional hearings, demanding that they do more to fact-check and censor, under the looming threat of their businesses being regulated or broken up. But time and again Democrats seemed less concerned about these firms’ monopolistic power and more about their apparent hesitance to wield it to the ends of censorship. 2020 was the year this all came to a head. First, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the big platforms abandoned any prior concerns they might have had about becoming the Ministry of Truth... Then came the US presidential election... at each turn, these corporate giants have had this role foisted upon them by a liberal establishment rattled by the Trump revolt and increasingly given to hysteria... liberals and leftists are already starting to wake up to the danger Trump’s social-media bans pose, and the shadow they could cast over politics in the future. In a recent New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg sums up the now common doublethink: ‘I find myself both agreeing with how technology giants have used their power in this case, and disturbed by just how awesome their power is.’ Other world leaders have, as you might imagine, found it all unsettling. A spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel – no free-speech advocate herself – said the social-media clampdown was ‘problematic’. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador went further, likening it to the Inquisition... When John Perry Barlow wrote his declaration 25 years ago, his aim was fixed squarely on the state. ‘Governments of the Industrial World’, he thundered, ‘I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ But in Western democracies today, at least, the primary threat to online free speech comes not from national governments, but from a Silicon Valley oligarchy that was elected by precisely no one."
From 2021
Cenk Uygur on X - "Hillary Clinton just said on CNN, “we lose total control” if social media content is not more regulated. Exactly! She's accidentally admitting the whole point of their attack on social media. Social media can't be contained and they're losing their grip on power. They hate it!"
Our 'experts' justify censorship of actual news with fake science to help Democrats - "Our “disinformation experts” are at it again, this time churning out a whole passel of pseudoscience under the aegis of once-respected Nature magazine to prove that icky, stupid right-wingers are dumb dumb dummies and that they deserve to be banned from X! Not like the supergeniuses of the modern left, who always get everything right and never tell lies. A new study — presumably peer reviewed — purports to show that Trump supporters and conservatives shared “low quality” news more often than their more enlightened counterparts and thus deserved the “politically asymmetric” sanctions. This study is another case of “garbage in, garbage out”: A huge part of its definition of “low quality” seems to mean sources that don’t rely on “fact checking” — which as the past eight years have shown has become a spurious and utterly partisan endeavor. Curious about what misinformation these “low quality” sites are spreading? Here’s a sample: the “unambiguously false” claim (per a paper cited in the Nature study) that “COVID-19 was created in a lab.” Trouble is, this “unambiguous” falsehood is (per the US federal government) true. Unsurprisingly, the No. 1 “high quality” news source shared by lefty users in the study was The New York Times. Right-leaning users shared Fox most often. Quickly: Which of those sources on balance has been more correct since 2016? The Times was wrong about Russiagate, writing story after story on Donald Trump’s alleged collusion based on obviously fake documents and never once apologizing for its journalistic malpractice. It was wrong about COVID on pretty much every aspect of the pandemic, from the efficacy of blue-state responses to the risk the virus presented to kids to the lab-leak theory and on and on and on. The Gray Lady helped lead the charge in trying to discredit The Post’s 100% accurate reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Hah: The very folks accusing us of spreading “disinformation” were actually doing so themselves. The Times also nakedly, openly lied about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental fitness for years in order to bolster his electoral prospects, then turned on a dime to admit he’s going gaga. And all of that somehow got through the industrial fact-checking complex. Wonder why? The answer’s simple: It helped Democrats politically, which is the purpose of “fact checking.” Keep in mind, no one is actually fooled by this. A look at the data tables provided by the study’s authors proves that. Consider CNN.com, ranked very highly by “fact checkers” at .84 out of a possible 1. When rated by “politically balanced laypeople,” it gets a .47. Sounds about right to us: CNN was the biggest, fakest voice on TV for the entirety of the Trump administration, blaring Russigate lies in primetime. Modern-day Pravda MSNBC gets a .66 from the fact-checkers but a .44 from the normies. And the Times itself, the holy grail of “false but true” lib journalism, ranks at .91 from fact checkers and .45 otherwise. What’s most obscene about all this, of course, is that despite the endless, humiliating public failure of “fact checking,” this paper was clearly written in service of the larger progressive goal of suppressing speech."
"Fact checkers" just exist to push the left wing agenda
Meme - *Mark Zuckerberg at beach* "Join my OnlyBans*"
Park MacDougald on X - "Lots of earnest “how did we lose Joe Rogan?” takes from Democrats seemingly unaware that their party’s NGO minions (Media Matters / CCDH) AstroTurfed a pressure campaign against Spotify to deplatform or censor Rogan that was then endorsed by the Surgeon General and White House press secretary"
David on X - "Yeah, as a part of that, Dana White said Disney (who owns ESPN, which has UFC rights) wanted UFC to fire Joe Rogan when all that Covid/Neil Young stuff was going on. A pile on happened. Dana refused to fire Joe, saying; 'If he is gone, I am gone'."
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "An instantaneous suspension for using the word "man" in this context would have happened 100% of the time under the old Twitter regime. Now you can tell the truth and the possibility of a suspension doesn't even occur to you when you press the "post" button."
Paula Scanlan @PaulaYScanlan: "Hey Jo, This man was literally in my locker room 18 times a week. Care to explain and defend this?"
Jo @JoJoFromJerz: "Hey MAGA, Men aren't "in girl's bathrooms." But Donald Trump has bragged about being in girl's dressing rooms."
The cope is that all people who claim to be transwomen aren't men (even if they are found to be pretending)
Meme - Hank from King of the Hill: "You know what's not cool, Bobby? My memes are being fact checked by people who think men can get pregnant."
Meta is ending its fact-checking program - "Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to "restore free expression" across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have "gone too far."... Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was put in place after the 2016 election and had been used to "manage content" and misinformation on its platforms, largely due to "political pressure," executives said... Meta is changing some of its own content moderation rules, especially those that they feel are "too restrictive and not allowing enough discourse around sensitive topics like immigration, trans issues and gender." "We want to make sure that discourse can happen freely on the platform without fear of censorship," Kaplan told Fox News Digital. "We have the power to change the rules and make them more supportive of free expression. And we’re not just changing the rules, we are actually changing how we enforce the rules." Kaplan said Meta currently uses automated systems, which he said make "too many mistakes" and removes content "that doesn’t even violate our standards." He also said there are certain things Meta will continue to moderate, like posts relating to terrorism, illegal drugs and child sexual exploitation... "We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and [is more] a huge supporter of free expression," Kaplan said, referring to the incoming Trump administration. "It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on." Last year, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he admitted that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, particularly with regard to COVID content, and even items like satire and humor. "The thing is, as American companies, when other governments around the world that don’t have our tradition or our First Amendment, when they see the United States government pressuring U.S. companies to take down content, it is just open season then for those governments to put more pressure [on their companies]," Kaplan explained. "We do think it is a real opportunity to work with the Trump administration and to work on free expression at home.""
The left hates democracy and free expression and loves censorship, so they are upset
Scott Adams on X - "I don't think this is a mystery. Zuckerberg is insanely smart and capable. (I could end the analysis here.) He's reading the room. He's a patriot. Apparently, he likes free speech as much as you do and sees the same issues you see. Business-wise, he needs the US government to pressure other nations to stop censoring. No other way. Facebook has been crippled by their own biased fact-checkers. Community Notes works, so he's a fast-follower. Summary: Smart, perfectly timed, on point."
Defiant L’s on X - "Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that the Facebook fact check program went out of control: “It’s like something out of 1984.” You don't say?"
Biden calls Meta’s decision to drop factchecking ‘really shameful’ - "“The whole idea of walking away from factchecking as well as not reporting anything having to do with discrimination regarding … I find it to be contrary to American justice,” the outgoing president told reporters during a press call on Friday. “Telling the truth matters.” Zuckerberg said last week that the decision to end the factchecking practice on Facebook, Instagram and Threads was made because Facebook’s factchecking, brought in December 2016, had done more harm than good in terms of public trust. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”... Zuckerberg claimed during an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience released on Friday that Biden administration officials had pressured Facebook to remove certain content from the social media platform. In a letter last year to Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the US House judiciary committee, Zuckerberg said that the White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to remove “certain Covid-19 content including humor and satire”. In his conversation with Rogan, Zuckerberg said: “Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse. It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’” Zuckerberg said he was not against vaccines per se. But he said that while the Biden administration was “trying to push” the Covid-19 vaccination program, “they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it”. He said that Facebook had “at times” bended to the administration’s bidding and made decisions that “with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today”."
American justice is politically motivated censorship. No wonder Biden is such a failure
Meme - Happy Merry and Pippin: "2021: Lol, cry harder conservatives. Private social media companies can do whatever they want."
Agonised Merry and Pippin: "2025:"
End Wokeness on X - "Amazon Web Services took Parler offline after January 6th because some of the trespassers posted on there. Reddit is literally a hotbed of domestic terror, including attacks on Tesla and copycat Luigi Mangione plots. AWS hosts Reddit."
Reddit Lies on X - ">Image of mildly vandalized Tesla posted to r/Seattle
>Post includes the Tesla's exact location
>Tesla is vandalized beyond repair in under 5 hours
It appears Reddit is being used to facilitate domestic terrorism."
Facebook moderation in Taiwan - "YouTuber Chen Yen-chang (陳延昶) posted a message on the Taiwan New Constitution Foundation’s Facebook page, saying: “Dear all, I support Taiwanese independence. Taiwan already is an independent country. I am a Taiwanese. I am not Chinese.” He later said that his Facebook access had been restricted for 30 days. The revelation prompted numerous complaints from commenters describing how they had been blocked or had their accounts deleted with no reason provided... Taiwan AI Labs founder Ethan Tu (杜奕瑾) shared my article and commented: “Welcome to Project Lutein,” referring to Taiwan AI Labs’ open-source analysis of social media neutrality. He was also given 30 days of restricted access to Facebook. Even though I was not banned from the platform, I was unable to sign in to Facebook for several hours. Moreover, posts by others on the issue were mysteriously removed... Facebook’s Chinese-language content moderators are mostly Chinese nationals, so it is difficult to prevent their influence on political content, and their tendency to seek control over the speech of Taiwanese and to infiltrate their lives."
From 2021
After Review, Facebook Says ‘Misgendering’ Doesn’t Violate Its Hate Speech Policy - "Facebook’s parent company Meta said that two posts that included “misgendering” were not a violation of its policies, in a case that appears to have involved content from The Daily Wire. The social media giant’s Oversight Board ruled that two posts about trans-identifying males do not violate the company’s hate speech rules... Rulings by the Oversight Board on specific posts are considered binding for the company... The move is the latest victory for conservative users as Meta says it is working to dial back censorship, including on gender identity."
Harrison H. Smith ✞ on X - "WTF? Just got an alert that a video on my Google Drive "Violates the Terms of Service." It's a Pro-White video on my private Drive. They say it has "gore" because it shows one still frame from the aftermath of a terror attack in France. This is the future of censorship."
Into the Memory Hole on X - ">you save an image to your phone
>the opinion it expresses has been deemed harmful and mean
>you are now banned and lose your email with everything tied to it
Boy that isn't radicalizing at all"
Musk's X says it won't cooperate with 'politically motivated' French probe - "Elon Musk's X on Monday accused French prosecutors of launching a "politically-motivated criminal investigation" that threatens its users' free speech, denying all allegations against it and saying it would not cooperate with the probe. Earlier this month, Paris prosecutors stepped up a preliminary probe into the social media platform for suspected algorithmic bias and fraudulent data extraction, authorising police to conduct searches, wiretaps and surveillance against Musk and X executives, or summon them to testify. If they do not comply, a judge could issue an arrest warrant... X said Paris prosecutors had requested it hand over data on all user posts for analysis by researchers David Chavalarias and Maziyar Panahi, who it said had both exhibited "open hostility towards X". Chavalarias did not respond to a request for comment. Panahi denied any involvement in the investigation... X also criticised the fact that it was being investigated under organised crime charges, which could allow police to wiretap its employees' personal devices."
Weird how when the left imposed its blatant bias on Twitter, they didn't do anything, and it was only after the left wing censorship was removed that they got investigated. The left just loves control
Mark Zuckerberg says Biden officials would 'scream' and 'curse' when seeking removal of Facebook content - ""Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse," Zuckerberg told podcast host and comedian Joe Rogan. "It just got to this point where we were like, 'No, we're not gonna, we're not gonna take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.'"... In a letter last year to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to remove “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”"
Clearly, there was nothing wrong here and this wasn't a violation of the First Amendment. But ABC affiliates refusing to show Jimmy Kimmel because of his mocking a political assassination was the biggest threat to free speech this millennium
Liberal billionaire George Soros has spent $80 million to 'silence' Americans, Media Research Center says - "Free Press, a media group financed by liberal billionaire George Soros, "is looking to incorporate global pressure to push Big Tech platforms to juice their censorship operations before the 2024 U.S. presidential election," according to the Media Research Center (MRC)... Free Press boasted about a letter urging executives at Discord, Google, Instagram, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Rumble, Snap, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter and YouTube to keep online platforms "safe and healthy" in 2024 through six specific "interventions." The letter was signed by "200 civil-society organizations, researchers and journalists," according to Free Press. The MRC found that "at least 45 of the signatories have had their coffers packed with Soros cash to the tune of a whopping $80,757,329 between 2016 and 2022 alone."... Vazquez wrote that the "explicit push for speech controls is especially disturbing in light of the stated vision of one of Free Press’s founders," noting that Free Press co-founder Robert W. McChesney once wrote in 2000, "Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism."... "The leftist group was recently exposed in a House Judiciary Committee investigation for co-authoring a ‘hate groups’ blacklist with the Soros-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI) targeting ‘conservative’ and faith-based organizations. This list was later disseminated by law enforcement to several financial institutions," Vazquez wrote... The MRC noted that Free Press previously "celebrated how it was also responsible for influencing the Obama-era FCC into adopting draconian ‘Net Neutrality’ rules that arbitrarily sanctioned massive government regulation of the internet," and "praised how the FCC reportedly cited the Soros-funded organization ‘close to 70 times’ in its final order on the matter.""
From 2024
