Tag: censorship

Doctor’s message about low pediatric deaths from COVID blocked by Facebook

Facebook removed a comment by a doctor on the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths. Facebook claimed the comment violated it “Community Standards on Spam.”

A Facebook user asked about the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths in the month of April. Dr. Tracy Høeg, a sports, spine, and regenerative medicine doctor, responded with factual information from the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and even included a graph.

“Part of the reason I have (for the most part) left Facebook is they delete my post/responses that are factual, which I triple check,” Dr. Tracy Høeg wrote in a May 20 Facebook post. “I was responding to a question about what the number of pediatric deaths were due to COVID in April. I don’t feel like directly citing numbers from CDC and AAP should be deleted as spam, but maybe that is just me. I have moved to Twitter FYI.”

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How Facebook uses ‘fact-checking’ to suppress scientific truth

At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high-school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events.

But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social-media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social-media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

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eBay says it will let governments automatically remove listings

In a move that observers fear may represent a setback for fair moderation of product listings – and of content in general – ecommerce giant eBay has announced that it is proceeding with a project aimed at allowing government regulators to remove items they see as “dangerous listings” directly from the site, with no need to consult the company.

eBay is also letting regulators – from some 50 countries around the world – decide that there is enough evidence that a listing might pose a risk to consumers, and once eBay declares these offices as “trusted authorities” their powers to remove items from the site will be unlimited. The company has not yet revealed the criteria that will guide this selection of state authorities it trusts to be making decisions in its place.

The company said the aim is to speed up and streamline the process of removal of listings, while the ones designated as dangerous will be considered either illegal or unsafe, and authorities will be able to delete them without further interacting with eBay.

eBay is talking up the project to wash its hands off responsibility for this type of online “moderation” as something that others in the industry will adopt as well, describing at the same time collaboration with authorities as “vital.”

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Google Docs gets social justice update, autocorrecting to gender neutral and politically correct language

Google announced on Tuesday, during its I/O developer conference, that editing capabilities of Google Docs have been expanded to police text and monitor a writer’s level of inclusivity.

Thus an update to the app means that Google Docs will start suggesting changing words like “mailman” to “mail carrier” and “chairman” to “chairperson,” it has been revealed.

Users will also be prompted to avoid using passive voice or what Google determines to be offensive language. It’s unclear from reports if the new feature will be opt-in or out, or hard-coded in the app, that is, impossible to avoid using.

This user-facing change comes after Google’s style guide for developers already seeking to “tidy up” language according to the sensitivities the giant is pandering to. For example, developers are instructed to replace “crazy” with “baffling,” “dummy variable” with “placeholder variable,” and “final sanity-check” with “final check for completeness and clarity.”

As early as 2018, Google got rid of gender pronouns from predictive text on Gmail for fear of offending somebody on that front, as well as of racial slurs, expletives, and mentions of business rivals.

CEO Sundar Pichai is said to have made implementing social justice tenets a priority for the whole of Google.

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The “Bonkers” Interview Of Bonny Prince Harry: Why The Attack On The First Amendment Should Concern All Americans

The media went into a frenzy this weekend when the bonny Prince Harry gave a huge Hurrumpf to the First Amendment. On a show appropriately called “the Armchair Expert,” Harry declared the First Amendment “bonkers” and expressed frustration of how it protects the media in its “feeding frenzy” over his life. Harry’s criticism of the First Amendment can be dismissed as the unfamiliarity of a royal refugee. However, it is actually far more serious than that. Harry and his American wife Meghan Markle have attacked media rights in England and succeeded under the laws of the United Kingdom. They are now joining a growing anti-free speech and free press movement in the United States.

It was not a surprise for many to hear Harry lash out at the First Amendment. After all, Harry and Meghan are so woke, they are virtual insomniacs.

However, that is the point. The First Amendment no longer holds the inviolate position it once did with the left.

Indeed, the First Amendment is now often treated as a danger than a guarantee to a fair and just society. Experts have explained how to evade its limitations to silence others. They have found precisely what Harry discussed in the interview when he noted “you can find a loophole in anything.”

Democratic leaders now openly call for corporate censorship and banning of books and authors. Academics now join in the cancelling of colleagues who express dissenting views of subjects ranging from climate change to gender identification to racial justice. Thus, it is not as risky for the Harry to declare “I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers.” Rather, millions are likely to wait in rapt anticipation to hear more of what Prince Harry will say about correcting our Constitution.

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Biden Revokes Trump Order Protecting Users From Censorship on Social Media

President Joe Biden this week revoked an order from the previous Trump administration that sought to protect users from unfair or deceptive content restriction practices by Big Tech companies.

The effect of the revocation would require the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the heads of executive departments to take steps to rescind any regulations or policies that enforced former President Donald Trump’s executive order entitled “Preventing Online Censorship,” which was signed in May last year.

Trump’s order sought to prevent social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from moderating users’ content in what his administration said was being done in an unbalanced and inconsistent way. The order cited examples from Twitter that added “fact-checking labels” to certain tweets in a manner that the administration said clearly reflects political bias.

Twitter added a “fact-checking” label on two of Trump’s tweets two days before the president issued his executive order. Trump accused Twitter of “selectively applying” its warning labels, arguing such action amounted to political activism.

Biden’s order also seeks to roll back liability protections under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That law largely exempts online platforms from liability for content posted by their users, although they can be held liable for content that violates anti-sex trafficking or intellectual property laws.

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Biden Secretary of Defense adviser pick once said online misinformation is a digital “plague”

In an op-ed from 2018, Biden’s pick for senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense, Bishop Garrison, described free speech as a “digital black plague.”

In the 2018 op-ed, resurfaced by Revolver News, Garrison described alleged disinformation, which to others is free speech, as a “digital black plague,” which if allowed to “spread further,” soon “the shining city on the hill will undoubtedly find itself alone in the darkness for years to come.”

Garrison also said that technology was responsible for the spread of disinformation, which to some, is any information they don’t like.

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Facebook, Social Media Giants Admit to Silencing Palestinian Voices Online

Activists reported that social media companies have been removing their content, stating it violated community guidelines or deeming it “hate speech.” Reports also included suspended and deactivated accounts and text-only content labeled “sensitive,” a designation usually reserved for photos and videos containing violence, gore or derogatory images. The “Save Sheikh Jarrah” Facebook group was also deactivated, according to Mohammed El-Kurd.

Reports were largely centered on Instagram and Twitter, with some restrictive behaviors conducted by Facebook and even TikTok.

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