Tag: censorship

Texas Republicans Give Massive Taxpayer Handouts to Big Tech, Effectively Financing Censorship of Their Voters

Texas Republicans have financed Big Tech companies like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars using the Texas Enterprise Fund.

The report from the Texas-based Current Revolt exposes the Texas Enterprise Fund, showing how Republicans in the Texas Legislature have backed the diversion of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars directly into the pockets of the Big Tech companies that engage in the censorship of their very own constituents.

The aim of the TEF, as disclosed on the Texas government website, is to award “deal closing” grants to companies in order to persuade them into choosing Texas as the location for their new site, whatever that may be. “The fund serves as a financial incentive for those companies whose projects would contribute significant capital investment and new employment opportunities to the state’s economy,” the website states.

However, the TEF, supported by a large list of Texas Republicans, gives money to Big Tech corporations, who regularly engage in the censorship and attempted cancellation of conservatives.

Facebook, who regularly bans conservatives from their platform and recently permanently banned President Donald Trump, were awarded $1.4 million.

Apple, who recently kicked conservative social media platform Parler off their App Store, received $46 million.

Uber, whose employees gave 97% of their political donations to Democrats, and who permanently banned former Republican Congressional candidate Laura Loomer from their service, were awarded $24 million.

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RFK Jr. kicked off Instagram for vaccine misinformation

Instagram on Wednesday banned Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, from repeatedly posting misinformation about vaccine safety and COVID-19.

Kennedy Jr. has amassed a huge following on social media, where he frequently posts debunked or unproven claims about vaccines. He also uses his social media pages to post about large pharmaceutical firms and environmental health concerns.

“We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said Thursday.

In an emailed statement, Kennedy Jr. stood by his Instagram posts, adding they have been carefully vetted.

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Editor’s note: disregard the following words: debunked, unproven, misinformation.

Instagram to Permanently Ban Users Who Send ‘Hate Speech’ in Private Messages

Instagram has announced that they will now be permanently banning users who send “hate speech” in private messages.

The platform announced their new speech policing policy on Wednesday.

In a statement about their censorship, Instagram boasted that 95% of the “6.5 million pieces of hate speech” from July through September were censored by the platform without anyone even reporting it. In other words, nobody was upset or offended, but the platform decided what you can or cannot see and share.

“Today, we’re announcing that we’ll take tougher action when we become aware of people breaking our rules in DMs. Currently, when someone sends DMs that break our rules, we prohibit that person from sending any more messages for a set period of time. Now, if someone continues to send violating messages, we’ll disable their account. We’ll also disable new accounts created to get around our messaging restrictions, and will continue to disable accounts we find that are created purely to send abusive messages,” the statement explained.

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Facebook’s enforcement report reveals AI is deleting 97 PERCENT of ‘hate speech’ before anyone reports it

Facebook has patted itself on the back for nuking almost all “hate speech” that supposedly violated its rules. But not only was most content deleted before anyone could flag it, users weren’t even allowed to appeal most deletions.

Unveiling its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the fourth quarter of 2020 on Thursday, Facebook bragged that its expanded use of artificial intelligence had helped it delete almost twice as much “bullying and harassment” content as the previous quarter, just one of several categories in which removals skyrocketed, while its Instagram subsidiary dramatically expanded its ability to catch suicide and self-injury related content.

Facebook axed 6.3 million bullying items, nearly doubling last quarter’s 3.5 million and assisted in large part by its AI technology. Expanded translation ability helped it remove 26.9 million pieces of “hate speech” content, up from 22.1 million in the third quarter. And Instagram nabbed 6.6 million pieces of hate speech while more than doubling the amount of suicide and self-harm content it removed – from 1.3 million to 3.4 million this quarter. 

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Youtube was So Afraid of What Came Out in Two Senate Hearings, It Banned U.S. Senate’s Videos

The United States Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs saw two videos vaporized in Stalinist fashion because Youtube’s censor didn’t see them as fit for public consumption.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the disturbing, Chinese-level act of censorship, which is raising alarms about where this is all heading:

Google’s YouTube has ratcheted up censorship to a new level by removing two videos from a U.S. Senate committee. They were from a Dec. 8 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on early treatment of Covid-19. One was a 30-minute summary; the other was the opening statement of critical-care specialist Pierre Kory.

It is interesting that one of the committee hearings relates directly to cheap drugs that might be used to treat COVID-19.

“At the December hearing, he presented evidence regarding the use of ivermectin, a cheap and widely available drug that treats tropical diseases caused by parasites, for prevention and early treatment of Covid-19,’ the Journal reported. “He described a just-published study from Argentina in which about 800 health-care workers received ivermectin and 400 didn’t. Not one of the 800 contracted Covid-19; 58% of the 400 did.”

Big Tech now seems fully committed to preventing transparency on public policy issues, even to the extent that it would ban videos from the U.S. Senate. That level of brazenness suggests that the corporations feel like they are untouchable. And beyond some lip service to holding these companies responsible, the U.S. government has thus far done nothing to challenge that assessment.

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Oliver Stone Says Fact Checkers Blocked Release of JFK Assassination Doc

According to three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone, America’s fascist “fact checkers” are blocking the release of his new documentary about the assassination of John Kennedy.

The far-left Variety does this thing where they have celebrities interview one another. The latest involved two Oscar-winning directors, Spike Lee and Stone. During their chat, Stone said he has a four-hour documentary about the 1963 assassination all ready to go, but fascist fact checkers are blocking its release:

Spike Lee: What’s the status of JFK documentary?

Oliver Stone: Well, the four hours that we did is very powerful. It’s based on the facts that came out of the of the [sic] movie. The movie kicked off the assassination records review board for five years. They were not empowered to investigate, but they were empowered to clarify. And they did the best they could with these limitations. The facts that they presented, we go into. It makes the case harder, tighter. It’s about real facts that are shocking to people.

Lee: So you can’t you can’t find a home for this doc?

Stone: Not yet. It’s not for the American side of it. Cannes invited us for July, or June, of this year.

…

Lee: Netflix said no?

Stone: Yeah. Today I just got the word that National Geographic said no.

Lee: What was the reason they said no?

Stone: They said they did their fact check. Yeah. Where are you going to find this information except in this film? If they do a fact check, according to conventional sources, of course it’ll come out like this is not true. How can you go and prove that it’s true? It’s very, it’s very tough. You have to have some imagination here.

Is an Oliver Stone documentary really going to be blacklisted in the United States of America?

Looks like it.

How un-American is that?

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Facebook says new algorithm will ‘reduce political content’ on news feeds

Facebook announced on Wednesday the social media platform will in the coming weeks start limiting the amount of political content viewers see on their news feeds.

The company is aware that “people don’t want political content to take over their News Feed,” Product Management Director Aastha Gupta wrote in a blog post on the site.

The change will begin with Facebook temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week.

Gupta said the process will begin in the U.S. in the coming weeks.

The initial rollout will allow the company to explore different methods of ranking political content prior to its deciding on a permanent solution.

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Google Quietly Escalates Manual Search Censorship

Google has quietly escalated censorship of its market-dominating search engine, adding a range of new topics where human moderators are allowed to manually penalize websites, suppressing them in search results.

If a website is affected by one of these manual acts of censorship, “some or all of that site will not be shown in Google search results,” according to the tech giant.

The list, published in full on Google’s support website, includes the following:

  • Discover policy violation: Adult-themed content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Dangerous content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Harassing content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Hateful content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Manipulated media
  • News and Discover policy violation: Medical content
  • Discover policy violation: Misleading content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Sexually explicit content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Terrorist content
  • News policy violation: Transparency
  • News and Discover policy violation: Violence and gore content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Vulgar language and profanity

Publishers who have been hit with a manual action by Google will be able to appeal the decision by “fixing” whatever issue violated the policy and then submitting their website to Google for a review. Google states that it could take “several days or a week” for the tech giant to reach a final decision, leaving

Once upon a time, Google attempted to conceal its censorship of search. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai insisted, under oath before congress, that the company does not “manually intervene on any particular search result,” a statement that one of Google’s own former employees said was a lie.

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Tulsi Gabbard tells Steven Crowder: Big tech does not get to decide who has a voice and who doesn’t

Gabbard — who recently warned that “domestic enemies” in big tech and the national security community, such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former CIA Director John Brennan, are plotting to create a “police state” in America — argued Monday that big tech’s threat to free speech is one of the most dangerous issues facing the country.

For years, giant tech companies such Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been scrutinized for arbitrarily censoring speech without consequence. But in recent months, the debate over their power has intensified amid the decision by several companies to ban former President Donald Trump from the platforms.

“Fundamentally as Americans, we agree on our constitutional right to free speech, [but now we] have these big tech monopolies essentially deciding who has a voice and who doesn’t in these virtual public town squares that they’ve created,” Gabbard lamented, adding, “You also have people in great positions of power in our government, for partisan or political reasons, trying to decide who gets to be heard and who doesn’t, just further inflaming the divisiveness and really, truly undermining our constitutional rights.”

“When we look at big tech and their ability to essentially act with impunity to do whatever they want — and making billions of dollars in the process — it speaks to the very dangerous place we are as a country,” she continued.

Gabbard called Trump’s removal from social media platforms a major indicator of how “dangerously powerful these big tech monopolies have become.”

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