Tag: censorship

How China Managed to Wipe Out All Mentions of Its Most Explosive #MeToo Case

Hours after Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused a former Communist Party official of sexual assault in a shocking online post, Eric Liu witnessed one of the most intensive censorship campaigns carried out before his eyes. 

The process looked familiar to Liu, who worked as a content censor at Weibo, the microblogging site where Peng described how former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli coerced her into sex before the two entered into an on-and-off affair. But the scale was unprecedented, the 34-year-old said, due to the shocking nature of Peng’s story, the sheer number of people on social media, and the Communist leadership’s growing desire to keep public opinion under control.

“It is an extremely grand-scale campaign,” said Liu, who quit the company in 2013 and is now tracking Chinese censorship for China Digital Times from the United States. “There is nothing that could be compared to this. Although more serious political events have taken place in the past, the internet censorship was not that strict. I would expect them to use their full capacity to carry this out.” 

The Communist Party leadership regards any scandal involving its core members as a threat to its rule. Since Peng’s post came out, Beijing has sought to wipe it out from the country’s history by banning media coverage, requiring around-the-clock human efforts from social media companies, and, through a system of punishments, coaxing citizens into self-censorship. It has demonstrated the country’s ability to keep its cyberspace insular even as the case was making international headlines every day. 

The goal is to make Peng’s accusations taboo, just like the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, so even those who have read the post would avoid talking about it, letting the incident recede from memory and lose its significance as China’s biggest #MeToo case.

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WHISTLEBLOWER: Facebook Internal Docs Likely Show How Tech Giant Blacklisted Kyle Rittenhouse

In order to do this, Facebook likely exploited a loophole that allowed them to skate around their terms of service and selectively moderate content. Internal documents shared with National File by Facebook whistleblower Ryan Hartwig shine light on these practices.

Hartwig worked on Facebook’s content moderation team while employed at a company called Cognizant from 2018-2020 until he eventually blew the whistle after realizing the platform’s content moderation efforts pushed political agendas and punished those who disagree. Hartwig now says he believes he knows the mechanisms Facebook used to purge all positive mention of Kyle Rittenhouse.

According to Hartwig, Facebook most likely branded the Kenosha shootings as a “mass murder”, then used that designation to purge pro-Rittenhouse content under the company’s “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy.

“In an effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm, we do not allow organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on Facebook,” reads the policy rationale.

Facebook will assess organizations both online and offline in order to gauge the likelihood of groups or individuals causing real world harm. Groups that fall under the dangerous organizations policy include terrorist organizations, “hate organizations”, organized crime syndicates such as drug cartels, and multiple-victim murderers.

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Facebook Employees Pushed Company To Exclude Criticism Of White People, Men From Hate Speech Rules

Facebook employees urged executives to exclude criticism directed towards white people and men from the company’s hate speech policies, according to internal documents reported on by The Washington Post.

Facebook researchers tried to change the company’s content moderation algorithms that automatically delete hate speech, because they viewed the algorithms as inadequately protecting minority users, The Washington Post reported, citing internal memos and research. The effort came following a document from April 2020 which showed that around 90% of hate speech algorithms were detecting and removing content directed towards white people and men.

Researchers argued that these figures indicated bias in Facebook’s automatic deletion algorithms because the content reported to be the most “harmful” or “the worst of the worst” was more often directed at minority groups, the Post reported.

The employees then urged Facebook executives, including the vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, to ditch Facebook’s “race-blind” hate speech algorithms which did not discriminate based on the race to which the hate speech was directed, according to the Post. Instead, the researchers pushed for algorithms that automatically removed hate speech directed only towards black people, Jews, LGBTQ individuals, Muslims and people of multiple races.

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Fighting “Information Disorder”: Aspen’s Orwellian Commission On Controlling Speech In America

The Aspen Institute has issued the results of its much heralded 16-person Commission on Information Disorder on how to protect the public from misinformation. The commission on disinformation and “building trust” was partially headed by Katie Couric who is still struggling with her own admission that she edited an interview to remove controversial statements by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Aspen recommendations however are a full-throated endorsement of systems of censorship.

The findings and recommendations are found in an 80-page report on how to combat “disinformation” and “misinformation,” which are remarkably ill-defined but treated as a matter of “we know when we see it.”  From the outset, however, the Commission dismissed the long-standing free speech principle that the solution to bad speech is better speech, not censorship. The problem is that many today object to allowing those with opposing views to continue to speak or others continue to listen to them.  The Commission quickly tosses the free speech norm to the side:

“The biggest lie of all, which this crisis thrives on, and which the beneficiaries of mis- and disinformation feed on, is that the crisis itself is uncontainable. One of the corollaries of that mythology is that, in order to fight bad information, all we need is more (and better distributed) good information. In reality, merely elevating truthful content is not nearly enough to change our current course.”

In addition to Couric, the Commission was headed by Color of Change President Rashad Robinson and Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Robinson was also a notable choice since he has been one of the most outspoken advocates of censorship. While some of us have been denouncing the expanding system of censorship by companies like Facebook, Robinson was threatening boycotts if the companies do not “rein in” those considered racists or spreaders of misinformation.

The Commission also includes Prince Harry who has referred to free speech protections under the First Amendment as “bonkers.”

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Facebook and Twitter Silent on Whether Kyle Rittenhouse Support Is Still Banned

Facebook and Twitter banned support for Kyle Rittenhouse across their platforms shortly after the Kenosha riots. After a jury in Wisconsin found Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges brought against him, those same platforms refuse to say if support for the teenager is still banned.

Rittenhouse was found not guilty on five charges including first-degree reckless homicide, two counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment. The presiding judge, Bruce Schroeder, also dismissed two additional weapons charges.

As Breitbart News recently reported, Big Tech companies continued to censor statements of support for Rittenhouse, even as the prosecution’s case fell apart:

Over a year old, the ban is still in place on both Facebook and Instagram and is even catching GOP Senate candidates like Josh Mandel in its net.

Facebook says supporting Rittenhouse violates its guidelines on “violence or dangerous organizations.”

Users on Twitter also report that the platform is still suspending them for supporting Rittenhouse.

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Social Media Companies Suppressed Claims of Kyle Rittenhouse’s Innocence

Social media platforms rendered a verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse long before he went to trial, suppressing claims that he was innocent and blocking users from searching for details of the case.

Immediately after the anti-police riots that thrust Rittenhouse into the national spotlight, social media companies began to block users who expressed support for the Illinois teen. Twitter suspended the accounts of users who called Rittenhouse innocent, including the defendant’s own lawyer. Facebook said it “designated this shooting as a mass murder and … removed the shooter’s accounts from Facebook and Instagram.” The platform also blocked searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse.”

Social media platforms often intervene to suppress posts expressing a particular stance on controversial issues. Both platforms censored news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the month before the 2020 election. Facebook blocked a Gold Star mother’s criticism of President Joe Biden and suppressed a song that criticized the president. Twitter and Facebook also suspended users who oppose vaccine mandates.

The fundraising platform GoFundMe also removed a page set up to support Rittenhouse, which the company said violated its ban on fundraisers involving “the legal defense of alleged crimes associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, or intolerance.” GoFundMe supported fundraising for the family of one of Rittenhouse’s assailants, Anthony Huber. The site regularly hosts fundraisers for individuals associated with Black Lives Matter. ​

When smaller platforms began raising funds for Rittenhouse, hackers breached the donation lists. News outlets doxxed paramedics and police officers who gave small donations to Rittenhouse’s defense.

Twitter is still banning or suspending users for supporting Rittenhouse, even as the trial proceeds. Facebook searches for Rittenhouse’s name turn up no results. Neither platform responded to requests for comment.

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Aspen Disinformation Group Includes Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Story

The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute’s disinformation commission.

Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen’s Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice’s reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax.

Commission members’ censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The commission blamed “decreasing levels of public trust” in public institutions for the crisis, which it dubs a “whole-of-society problem that can have life-or-death consequences.” Its report calls for Congress and the White House to take action to counteract disinformation.

Roth, the head of site integrity at Twitter, blocked access to an Oct. 14, 2020, New York Post article regarding emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Roth told the Federal Elections Commission he blocked the story in part because the intelligence community had briefed him that foreign governments might release hacked materials prior to the election. No evidence has emerged that Biden’s laptop was stolen or hacked, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has since acknowledged that the company should not have blocked links to the story.

The Aspen Commission report criticizes Twitter and other social media companies for failures to rein in disinformation but does not cite Twitter’s censorship of the Biden article.

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Instagram censors highly regarded Cochrane Collaboration for medical “misinformation”

Instagram has censored the Cochrane Collaboration, a non-profit organization focused on medical research, for spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19.

In an effort to stop the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus, social media platforms have been censoring content that contradicts the stance of public health bodies, including the CDC and WHO. However, by playing the role of arbiters of truth, online platforms have ended up censoring trustworthy sources.

The latest example of overzealous and rash censorship affected the Cochrane Collaboration on Instagram. The platform prohibited users from mentioning the organization because it “repeatedly posted content that goes against our community guidelines on false content about COVID-19 or vaccines.”

The Cochrane Collaboration is an international team of over 30,000 experts who publish high-quality reviews on medical topics. The organization had published over 7,000 systematic reviews.

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