Tag: facebook

Report: Half of Trump’s Twitter and Facebook Posts Since Election Day Flagged as Misinformation

A recent report states that half of President Donald Trump’s posts since election day have been flagged as misinformation by Facebook and Twitter and censored on each platform.

Forbes reports that half of President Trump’s social media posts on Facebook and Twitter since election day have been labeled as false or questionable by the social media giants.

Of President Trump’s 22 posts on Facebook and Twitter, 11 have been labeled by the Silicon Valley tech firms. The posts include the President’s claims to victory and assertions of election fraud taking place. Twitter hid some posts on the President’s timeline and warned users that “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process,” and restricted users’ ability to like or retweet the tweets.

Underneath some of President Trump’s Facebook posts, the social media company warned users that “final votes may different from the initial vote counts” or “elections officials follow strict rules when it comes to ballot counting, handling and reporting,” but users were still able to reply to and share the posts.

Keep reading

From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent

Thorning-Schmidt’s insensitive moment at the laying-in-state of one of the most significant figures of the 20th century may be less damning to her presence on a social media oversight board than the tax-evasion scandal involving her husband – a British MP –, which ended up costing her re-election. When confronted over the accusations, she retorted that if her intention had really been to evade taxes, she would have done so “much more elegantly.” Despite these questionable instances and her reputation as an “extravagant” woman with expensive tastes, Thorning-Schmidt remains among the least objectionable figures on the oversight board.

Emi Palmor, for example, presents a much more alarming profile. One of 16 non-chair members of the board, Palmor is a former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, she was directly responsible for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from Facebook. Before being fired from that job, Palmor had created the so-called “Internet Referral Unit” at the ministry; a cybersecurity team that deliberately targeted and took down the aforementioned content, and whose nomination to the Facebook oversight board was loudly protested by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups back in May.

Keep reading

Obama-Era Officials Call for More Government Control of Your Facebook Feed

Writing in the Washington Post, senior Obama-era official Samantha Power has called on social media giant Facebook to do more to crush what she calls conspiracy theories and disinformation circulating on its platform.

Describing it as being “overrun with foreign disinformation,” Power demanded Mark Zuckerberg “take far more drastic steps” to “detox” the company’s algorithm. The former United States ambassador to the United Nations compared the viral vitriol circulating on Zuckerberg’s platform to the weaponized disinformation campaigns in the former Yugoslavia, implying that it could help spark a conflict in the United States.

52 percent of Americans get news on Facebook, making it an enormously powerful and influential news service, not just a social media or messaging app. For years, it has at least partially outsourced its news feed algorithm cultivation to the Atlantic Council, a NATO cutout organization funded by the U.S. government and headed and controlled by former CIA chiefs. Thus, the government already has significant control over the content on America’s most important media platform.

Keep reading

Facebook labels 2+2=4 “misinformation”

On the 5th of October, the WHO’s Dr Michale Ryan claimed “about 10%” of the global population had been infected with Sars-Cov-2. With an alleged death toll of roughly 1 million, that puts the infection-fatality ratio at roughly 0.14%.

He said it, we reported it. The maths is not disputable. And yet Facebook has flagged it as “misinformation”…

Keep reading

Facebook ‘Content Regulation Manager’ Anna Makanju Advised Joe Biden on Ukraine

Facebook’s global policy manager for content regulation, Anna Makanju, advised Joe Biden on Ukraine policy during his time as Vice President. She also defended Biden from charges of wrongdoing with regards to Ukraine in a comment to the Washington Post last year.

Her position as a senior employee at Facebook handling content regulation may have given her an opportunity to influence the social network’s decision to suppress a New York Post story revealing that Joe Biden’s son Hunter, then on a lucrative contract with the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, introduced the then-Vice President to an executive at the company.

This occurred less than a year before the then-VP pressured the Ukrainian government into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.

Makanju is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, which partnered with Facebook in 2018 to promote “election integrity” around the world.

Keep reading

Facebook and Twitter’s Intervention Highlights Dangerous New Double Standard

The only thing that should matter, when it comes to stories like this, is whether or not the material is true and in the public interest. This disturbing new confederation of media outlets and tech firms is rewriting that standard.

The optics of a former Democratic Party spokesman suddenly donning a Facebook official’s hat to announce a ban of a story damaging to Democrats couldn’t be worse. Moreover, the Orwellian construct described in papers like the Times suggests that for tech executives, pundits, and Democratic Party officials alike, the lines between fake news and bad news, between actual misinformation and information that is merely politically adverse, have been blurred. It’s no longer clear that some of these people see a meaningful distinction between the two ideas.

The public can’t help but see this. While papers like the Times denounce the true Podesta emails as “misinformation,” and Facebook says the New York Post story must be kept out of sight until verified, the standard for, say, the Steele dossier was and is opposite. In that case, we were told “raw intelligence” should be published so that “Americans can make up their own minds” about information that, while “salacious and unverified,” may still be freely read on Twitter and Facebook, reported on in the New York Times and Washington Post, and talked about on NBC, so long as it has not been completely “disproven.”

As Erik Wemple of the Washington Post points out, even that last point is no longer true, but the Steele dossier and plenty of other products of what Axios calls “hack and leak” journalism continue to be embraced and freely distributed. The obvious double-standard guarantees that the tech platforms will henceforth be viewed by a huge portion of the population as political censors instead of standards enforcers, and moreover that mainstream press pronouncements about such controversies will be deemed automatically untrustworthy by that same population.

Keep reading