“Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.”
Henry Steele Commager
Tag: censorship
Facebook, Twitter make editorial decisions to limit distribution of story claiming to show ‘smoking gun’ emails related to Biden and his son
Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday limited the distribution of a New York Post story that claims to show “smoking gun” emails related to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son.
“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners,” tweeted Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Facebook censorship…
Antony Mueller on censorship…
No, Facebook is NOT “Private,” Their Censorship Arm is Government Funded
Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council, so what, right? They can do whatever they want and hire outside third parties to help them police the platform they own, right? Yes, this is correct. However, the Atlantic Council is funded by government.
The Atlantic Council is the group that NATO uses to whitewash wars and foster hatred toward Russia, which in turn allows them to continue to justify themselves. It’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. It is also funded by billionaire oligarchs like the Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk and Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri.
The list goes on. The highly unethical HSBC group — who has been caught numerous times laundering money for cartels and terrorists — is listed as one of their top donors. They are also funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Google, the United States, the US Army, and the Airforce.
Facebook Bans Ads Questioning Safety Of COVID-19 Vaccines
The company has also launched salvos against QAnon and election-related misinformation, while taking an aggressive approach toward political advertising, and political content in general.
And as global authorities struggle to convince the public that an eventual COVID-19 vaccine will be safe to take despite the expedited approval process, Facebook has decided to give them a hand by banning all content encouraging users to refuse to take a vaccine. It laid out the new global policy in a blog post published Tuesday.
“Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we’ll reject it,” the company’s Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin and Director of Product Management Rob Leathern said in a blog post Tuesday.
Facebook will draw the line at allowing users who advocate against “mandatory vaccination,” which the company said was a legitimate political position (not an argument made in “bad faith” that some on the left insist), to post as normal. They cited an example of a state lawmaker from Virginia who posted “STOP FORCED CORONAVIRUS VACCINATIONS”.
Things you’re not allowed to mention…
Facebook bans Holocaust denial content
Facebook has announced it will remove all content on its platform that “denies or distorts the Holocaust.” The company says this expansion of its hate speech policies is a response to what it calls “the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people.” Facebook has previously faced strong criticism for letting Holocaust denial content spread freely on its platform.
In addition to removing content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, the company says that, starting later this year, it will direct anyone searching on Facebook for terms related to this topic to “credible information” supplied by third-party sources.
“Enforcement of these policies cannot happen overnight. There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement,” said Facebook’s VP of content policy, Monika Bickert, in a blog post.
Earlier this year, Facebook said it would ban anti-Semitic stereotypes that depicts Jewish people as “running the world or its major institutions.” But a report a week later by a UK counter-extremism group, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), found that the company’s algorithm “actively promotes” Holocaust denial content.
Removing content that denies or distorts the Holocaust may seem like an obvious decision for a company that is frequently accused of enabling hate speech. But in the past, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, has presented the company’s tolerance of Holocaust denial as an example of its commitment to principles of free speech.
In an interview with Recode in 2018, Zuckerberg said that Facebook wouldn’t remove content from Holocaust deniers because he believed these individuals weren’t “intentionally getting it [the Holocaust] wrong.”
“It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent,” said Zuckerberg. “I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, ‘We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.’” (Zuckerberg later added: “I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.”)
In a Facebook post today, Zuckerberg said his thinking on the matter had “evolved,” in part in response to a climate of “rising anti-Semitism.”
The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship Of Colleagues
THE NEW YORK TIMES GUILD, the union of employees of the Paper of Record, tweeted a condemnation on Sunday of one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens. Their denunciation was marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company “rules” against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people, is to woefully understate the case.
What angered the union today was an op-ed by Stephens on Friday which voiced numerous criticisms of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning “1619 Project,” published last year by the New York Times Magazine and spearheaded by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. One of the Project’s principal arguments was expressed by a now-silently-deleted sentence that introduced it: “that the country’s true birth date” is not 1776, as has long been widely believed, but rather late 1619, when, the article claims, the first African slaves arrived on U.S. soil.
Despite its Pulitzer, the “1619 Project” has become a hotly contested political and academic controversy, with the Trump administration seeking to block attempts to integrate its assertions into school curriculums, while numerous scholars of history accuse it of radically distorting historical fact, with some, such as Brown University’s Glenn Loury, calling on the Pulitzer Board to revoke its award. Scholars have also vocally criticized the Times for stealth edits of the article’s key claims long after publication, without even noting to readers that it made these substantive changes let alone explaining why it made them.
Twitter Adds New Restrictions To Crack Down On Spam, ‘Misinformation’ Ahead Of Election Day
Following in the footsteps of Facebook, which last month announced plans to launch its long-promised “oversight board” before Nov. 3, Twitter has announced that it’s planning a raft of measures, including making it more difficult for tweets to go viral ahead of the vote, to ensure that social media doesn’t contribute to any election day violence.
According to a blog post published around noon on Friday, one of the ‘speed bumps’ being implemented by twitter will prompt users to add a “comment” when they go to share – or retweet – a tweet. The move is designed to slow the rapid-fire retweeting of others” – a behavior that President Trump, one of the world’s most famous Twitter users, has occasionally exhibited.
Twitter’s recommendations and trends features will see “new curbs” added to try and prevent abuse.
“Twitter has a critical role to play in protecting the integrity of the election conversation, and we encourage candidates, campaigns, news outlets and voters to use Twitter respectfully and to recognize our collective responsibility to the electorate to guarantee a safe, fair and legitimate democratic process this November,” company officials said in a blog post – written by Vijaya Gadde, the Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead at Twitter, and Kayvon Beykpour, its product lead – published at noon Friday.
Politicians, including President Trump, will be subjected to new restrictions if they start to share “falsehoods” according to Twitter. If they continue sharing “false” information – aka information that challenges the Democratic narrative – the accounts will be hit with “additional warnings and restrictions”.
Hellbound and Down 
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