Tag: censorship

Oops! Teachers’ union chief admits sharing fake list of ‘banned’ books

A teachers’ union chief who worked aggressively to keep public schools closed during the COVID pandemic now has admitted to sharing a list of “banned” books that was a fake.

The response from Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, to her mistake? “My bad”

Fox News explained Weingarten had posted on social media the list of so-called “banned” books.

The but list, originally posted online by “Freesus Patriot,” said Florida has banned classics like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “A Wrinkle in Time,” which it hasn’t.

Weingarten explained, “I should have double checked before I retweeted this list. My bad. Looks like some of the books weren’t banned. Book bans are very real & dangerous.”

The issue of banned books has been triggered by the extreme leftist agenda being adopted by some public school districts, promoting transgenderism for children while concealing that ideology from parents, Critical Race Theory which teaches America is racist and to get rid of that racism more racism is needed, and more. Those theories often are promoted by books that leftist districts install in their libraries and are handed out to children.

Many parents with traditional moral and educational values would prefer that their tax-funded public schools not teach extremes like those. So the issue of what books are available – and promoted – to children becomes significant

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Google continues editorializing searches by adding “content advisories” to search results

It has hardly ever been enough for Google just to be able to censor content on YouTube and apps in its store – “curating” and, critics say, essentially editorializing what users can see when they use Google Search has been high on the list of priorities for a while.

(Article by Didi Rankovic republished from ReclaimTheNet.org)

Coincidentally or not, in the year of US midterm elections, the giant is ramping up this effort to make sure the search engine isn’t simply returning results – like people might still expect it to do – but what Google decides are “trustworthy results” as opposed to “falsehoods and misinformation.”

Google’s self-styled standard of what passes the trustworthiness test is described in the vaguest of terms, ostensibly so that a lot of things can fit that definition: it’s when the behemoth’s systems “don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results.”

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Facebook censors claims IRS posted job requiring “deadly force”

Facebook and Instagram have censored the Heritage Foundation and others for suggesting that a job posting by the Internal Revenue Services required a willingness to use deadly force.

The Heritage Foundation’s posts were slapped with a “missing context” label reading.

The original job posting, which has since been edited, read that “special agents” in the agency’s Criminal Investigation branch are required to “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force if necessary.”

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Meta steps up information control ahead of US elections

Social media behemoth Meta is beefing up its information-control tactics as the US heads into the 2022 midterm elections, tightening rules on voting misinformation and advertising. The changes were announced in a blog post on Tuesday.

The company will ban new political, social and electoral issue ads during the last week before the election, ensuring no “October surprises” – factual or otherwise – will disturb the information ecosystem. Editing existing ads will also be forbidden, and ads encouraging people not to vote or questioning the legitimacy of the results will not be permitted.

To further ensure the sanctity of the vote, Meta says it is investing in “proactive threat detection” with the aim of countering “coordinated harassment and threats of violence against election officials and poll workers.” The company is also holding regular meetings with the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Elections Directors, state and local elections officials, and the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Meta is deploying fact checkers in multiple languages for the midterms and expanding the service to WhatsApp, boasting five new partners in Spanish, including Univision and Telemundo. This is part of a $5 million boost in “fact-checking and media literacy initiatives” ahead of November’s vote.

The platform promised to deploy fewer “labels that connect people with reliable information” during the 2022 season, acknowledging user feedback had tipped them off that such labels were “over-used” in 2020.

Bragging it had banned more than 270 “white supremacist organizations” and deleted over 2.5 million content items tied to “organized hate” in the first quarter of 2022 alone, the platform revealed 97% of the content in question had been removed by its algorithms without anyone reporting it – raising the question of how hateful it was given the absence of an offended party.

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New York Times Asked Communist Chinese Tech Company To Censor Americans

The New York Times asked TikTok, a social media app with known connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to censor American users sharing election integrity concerns on its platform.

In a recent article titled, “On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms,” Times writer Tiffany Hsu details how “TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information” ahead of the 2022 midterms, with the issue of voter fraud being a prominent topic shared across the platform. Buried within the article, however, Hsu tacitly reveals that as a result of the Times reaching out to the CCP-connected company, TikTok began censoring users from using a popular hashtag associated with fears about election interference.

“Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month,” the article reads. “Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times.”

Hsu goes on to note the platform’s failure to address the spread of “misinformation” in foreign elections, citing those in France and Australia as examples.

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Bing is censoring search results for Alex Berenson’s “Unreported Truths” Substack

Bing, a search engine owned by Microsoft, is censoring search results for journalist and author Alex Berenson’s “Unreported Truths” website and newsletter that he hosts on the free speech publishing platform Substack.

Reclaim The Net tested multiple Bing queries with the search operator “site:alexberenson.substack.com.”

“site:alexberenson.substack.com” is a search operator that is supposed to return search results from Berenson’s Unreported Truths Substack which lives on a subdomain. If a website returns no results when the “site:” operator is used, it means that the domain isn’t indexed at all by Bing’s search engine.

We searched for both general terms related to the name of Berenson’s Substack (such as “Alex Berenson” and “Unreported Truths”) and more specific terms related to the topics that Berenson writes about on his Substack (such as “Twitter” and “vaccine.”)

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Hypocrites! Disney adopts “don’t say gay” policy in order to appease Middle East censors

Disney, which famously went to battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over that state’s Child Protection Act, hilariously named the “Don’t Say Gay” bill may have a little bit of explaining to do over its blatant virtue-signaling hypocrisy.

The decision to throw down with the radical alphabet mafia cost the entertainment titan a ton of money in canceled Disney+ subscriptions and canceled Disney World vacations by parents who think their children don’t need to be groomed by what used to be a wholesome entertainment company.

Now, they may have some ‘splainin’ to do with the alphabet community.

According to RedState, the House of Mouse has decided to remove all LGBTQXYZ content from Disney+, the company’s streaming service. Oh, not for the West but for Middle Eastern countries as a means to pacify censors there.

Bounding Into Comics writes that after several Disney films were banned in the Middle East for alphabet community-friendly content, such as Thor: Love and Thunder and The Eternals, Disney has caved to censors in Middle Eastern countries and will remove LGBTQ content from Disney+ there.

According to a release, a Disney spokesperson said:

“Content offerings differ across our many Disney+ markets, based upon a number of factors. Content available should align with local regulatory requirements,” while also stressing the platform has parental controls which allows parents to decide what their family members are able to view.

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Twitter Bans Women Who Complained About ‘Transgender’ Rugby Player Competing Against 16-Year-Old Girls

After a biological male in his 30’s who identifies as a transgender woman was allowed to compete in a Gaelic soccer final against 16-year-old girls, women who complained about it had their accounts banned by Twitter.

The transgender in question, Giulia Valentino, is a balding man who moved to Dublin from Italy and has previously advocated for women’s sport to allow transgenders to compete as well as complaining about not being able to use female changing rooms.

As the image above shows, Valentino clearly has an unfair physical advantage over the female players yet was allowed to compete anyway for Na Gaeil Aeracha, which describes itself as Ireland’s “first explicitly LGBTQ+ inclusive” football club.

After Na Gaeil Aeracha won the 2022 Junior J Shield tournament with ease, critics were censored for questioning Valentino’s involvement.

“I think it is preposterous. Twitter clearly has its own agenda and considers this to be hate speech. Utterly bonkers,” one woman told the Daily Mail.

“Seemingly many individuals have had their accounts locked or suspended by merely pointing out a scientific truth.”

Some had their accounts locked, but many were banned outright for calling Valentino a man.

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Facebook blocks #diedsuddenly hashtag

Facebook has hidden posts with the “#diedsuddenly” hashtag because it claims that some of these posts violate its far-reaching community standards. When users search for this hashtag, no results are displayed and Facebook shows a message stating that the results are hidden.

While Facebook doesn’t specify which rules these posts allegedly violated, Twitter users have been using the hashtag to share news stories about people who died suddenly. Most of these Twitter posts note that those who died were fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and allude to there being a connection between the vaccines and their deaths.

If Facebook users are posting similar content under this hashtag, the posts are likely to violate the tech giant’s ban on a wide range of COVID-19 vaccine claims. Facebook prohibits claims that “vaccines are toxic, dangerous, or cause autism” and reduces the distribution of “shocking stories” about the vaccines. One of Facebook’s examples of a shocking story is “Uncovered: See the 632 reports made of people who died within a week of having the new COVID-19 vaccine.”

The blocking of this hashtag is the latest of many examples of Facebook censoring content that is critical of or raises questions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, Facebook has also mass censored anti-mask content, anti-lockdown content, and content that said the coronavirus came from a lab (a censorship policy that was suddenly reversed after the Biden admin announced that it would be investigating the origins of COVID).

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