Tag: censorship

When Billionaires And The Government Work Together To Control Information

Facebook restricted visibility of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election after receiving counsel from the FBI, according to Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said during a Thursday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”

Zuckerberg said a decision was made to restrict that information on Facebook’s multibillion-user platform. He said that unlike Twitter, which banned the sharing of the article entirely, Facebook opted for the somewhat subtler option of censorship by algorithm.

“The distribution on Facebook was decreased,” he said, adding when pressed by Rogan that the decreased visibility of the article happened to a “meaningful” extent.

As we’ve discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is becoming the preferred censorship method on large Silicon Valley platforms because it can be done to far more people with far less objection than outright de-platforming and bans.

Keep reading

Pre-Bunking: The Social Media Censorship Crowd’s Latest Craze

In what must be the latest effort to “fortify” future elections, it seems that Big Tech is ablaze with the idea of “pre-bunking” —using a proactive campaign to pre-empt political narratives that could supposedly lead to disinformation.

On Wednesday, Google released a new study that claimed showing simple cartoons discussing things like how ad hominem attacks are bad could ward off gullible rubes from believing things that are not true, according to NBC News. The leaders of the study also found that changing which words are used to discuss facts could also lead to better results for those who want to control the narrative protect safe and secure elections.

“Words like ‘fact-checking’ themselves are becoming politicized, and that’s a problem, so you need to find a way around that,” Jon Roozenbeek, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University’s Social Decision-Making Lab, told NBC.

So for example, instead of seeing an ad just prior to a YouTube video, individuals might see a cartoon for 10 seconds talking about a broad topic. The idea is to “inoculate” the viewer, similar to a vaccine, NBC News explained.

Keep reading

The University of Massachusetts Lowell Bans Students From Sending or Viewing “offensive” Material Online

Most of the internet is apparently off-limits for students at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

The school’s Acceptable Use Policy, which governs the use of computing and networking resources, prohibits students from intentionally transmitting, communicating or accessing “offensive” material. Every month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression highlights a university policy that hinders students’ free expression. Since most online content could be called offensive by someone, the policy has earned the dubious honor of FIRE’s August Speech Code of the Month.

The Supreme Court has explicitly held, time and time again, that speech cannot be restricted by the government merely because it offends others. In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Court held that burning the American flag was protected speech, explaining: “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

In spite of such clear precedent, colleges and universities routinely ban offensive speech in campus speech codes, especially in IT policies. Whether a person is burning a flag at a protest or advocating for (or against) flag burning on Twitter, a ban on “offensive” speech calls for impermissible viewpoint discrimination.

UMass Lowell couldn’t possibly take action every time someone views or retweets something subjectively offensive over university wifi — every single student, and probably every professor, would be on trial. But a policy like this makes it all too easy for the university to crack down on select, disfavored speech.

Keep reading

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

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.”)

Keep reading