Tag: censorship

Facebook Introducing a ‘Virality Circuit Breaker’ to Prevent Spread of Viral Content

According to a recent report from the Interface newsletter by Verge reporter Casey Newton, Facebook is piloting a new program that will monitor viral posts that gain millions of views to ensure that they don’t violate community standards.

The Verge reporter Casey Newton reports in the newsletter the Interface that social media giant Facebook is developing a new program to fight viral misinformation on the platform. In the newsletter, Newton lists suggestions made by the Center for American Progress (CAP) to prevent the spread of certain content on the platform.

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Twitter’s purge of the anti-woke satirists

Titania was not the only victim. The Babylon Bee, a US satire site, was also temporarily locked out, though it has since been restored. Other satirical accounts – Jarvis Dupont, Guy Verhoftwat, Tolerance Police, Liberal Larry and Sir Lefty Farr-Right QC – all remain suspended. Sir Lefty revealed on Parler that the only reason given for his suspension was ‘platform manipulation and dissemination of spam’.

All the accounts did was make fun of wokeness. But it seems virtue-signalling Silicon Valley nerds can’t take a joke. Apparently, this kind of comedy needs to be silenced.

Ironically, Twitter’s purge of the anti-woke satirists is a complete vindication of their work. In banning those who make fun of wokeness and criticise its censoriousness, Twitter has made it even clearer how authoritarian that wokeness is.

It has also shown wokeness to be totally humourless. Silicon Valley nerds need to lighten up.

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YouTube To End Election “Interference”… By Interfering With The Free Press

Ever heard of destroying something in order to save it? Check out the latest genius move in the name of virtue-signaling from YouTube.

The world’s largest video platform, with more than 2 billion users a month, will ban videos containing information that was obtained through hacking and could meddle with elections or censuses. That would include material like hacked campaign emails with details about a candidate. The update follows the announcement of a similar rule that Google, which owns YouTube, unveiled earlier this month banning ads that contain hacked information. Google will start enforcing that policy Sept. 1. 

Which is preposterous. If some kind of news from some kind of hack is hot, all that matters is whether it’s true or not, not whether it changes public perceptions. YouTube is focused on those ‘perceptions’ though and has changed its policy to make sure there is no change of perceptions. Status quo, anyone? They’re very fond of the status quo. It’s a stupid idea because we all know what this is about – the 2016 hacked John Podesta emails and all the interesting news about what Democrats say to each other away from the cameras and public relations spin operations. It was mostly inside baseball, and didn’t affect the election, but the Democrats, bitter about Hillary Clinton’s election loss, and still not admitting the problem was their bad candidate who refused to go to Wisconsin, continue to say it did.

This YouTube move accommodates their looney logic, which is a partisan political statement right there.

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How We Could Wind Up Banned From Discussing An October Surprise On Social Media This Election

This by itself is an alarming assault on human communication and press freedom. If there is authentic information out there about either of the candidates who are up for the most powerful elected position on the planet, the world is entitled to know about it, regardless of how that information was acquired. Monopolistic tech oligarchs have no business barring us from learning about and discussing that information.

Immensely powerful people should not be permitted to have secrets from the public anyway. The amount of power one has should be directly inverse to the amount of secrecy they are permitted to have. If you’re anywhere near the presidency of the United States of America, the secrecy you are entitled to should be zero.

If a hacker is able to get ahold of accurate information about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, that information is ours. We’re entitled to it. Anyone who tries to obstruct our access to that information is stealing from us. It’s absolutely ridiculous that we have a society where people are permitted to both rule over us and keep secrets from us as it is without government-aligned tech plutocrats silencing our attempts to learn what those secrets might be.

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TikTok and America’s fake Internet Freedom War

Just about every layer of America’s media and political class shares his view that China is a force of pure undemocratic evil that needs to have its kneecaps shot out. From the respectable prog-left, to the radical center, and the right — the push to restrict China’s incursion into America’s telecommunication space enjoys multi-spectrum partisan consensus. Everyone who is anyone backs Steven Bannon’s vision. So no surprises there.

What interesting about seeing this “the Internet is a threat” stuff put into an official presidential executive order is that for years the Chinese government has been basically saying the same exact thing: that the Internet is a dangerous weapon that can be wielded by an aggressive foreign power.

But instead of being seen as a sensible and correct position — which it was, especially in the beginning — China was mocked and criticized as a weak, authoritarian power that’s afraid of letting its people communicate freely with the outside world. “THIS IS WHAT CHINESE COMMUNISM LOOKS LIKE,” we were told. “THIS IS HOW EVIL THEY ARE!”

Meanwhile, as if to prove China’s point, America launched bottomless-dollar initiative to make sure China wouldn’t be able to control its own domestic Internet space. Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this came to be known as America’s war for “Internet Freedom” — a war which actually started back in the early 2000, when this privatized Pentagon tech first began to go global.

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