Tag: instagram

Republican Lt. Gov. Vows to Keep Thirsting Over Queer Instagram Nudes

A PERSON IS always wise to remember that Instagram likes and comments are public. But a 79-year-old man who likes what he sees is not always disposed to restrain himself, and it looks as though Tennessee Lt. Governor Randy McNally is one such fellow.

As the Tennessee Holler first reported on Wednesday, McNally has for some time been a devoted fan of Franklyn McClur, a 20-year-old gay man who grew up in Knoxville and aspires to move to Los Angeles to make it in show business. McClur’s Instagram photos and captions are often suggestive in nature; he shows off his body, sometimes posing fully nude, and wears makeup. All pretty standard as far as the app goes. What’s unusual is that McNally has for months used his own verified account to unabashedly compliment McClur’s thirst traps — this while his state moves to criminalize drag shows and gender-affirming care for transgender children as part of the nationwide Republican push for laws targeting the LGBTQ community.

“Finn, you can turn a rainy day into rainbows and sunshine!” McNally wrote, using McClur’s nickname, on a January photo in which the younger man shows off his butt in tight-fitting underwear. In a follow-up comment, he appended heart and flame emojis. Elsewhere, McNally has complimented McClur’s skimpy outfits and told him, “You need to be on dancing with the stars.” On a nude photo which McClur captioned “I Love being naked.. the Garden of Eden, is My Vibe. I Understand God,” McNally replied, “Great picture, Finn! Best wishes for continued health and happiness.”

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Facebook, Instagram Just Updated Changed Their Policy To Allow Images Of Bare Breasts On The Platforms — But Only For ‘Trans,’ ‘Non-Binary’

Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram are modifying their regulations to allow transgender and non-binary users to post photos and videos featuring their bare breasts, according to an update published on Meta’s advisory board.

The same rules will not apply to biological females. The tech oligarchs will not permit women who identify as female to flash their bare breasts on the social media platforms.

Meta’s Oversight Board ordered Facebook and Instagram to rescind a ban on images of men with breasts who identify as transgender and anyone who identifies as “non-binary,” those who view themselves as neither male nor female.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg instituted the Meta Oversight Board in 2018 to act as the company’s “Supreme Court,” providing the platform’s governing body the authority to make precedent-setting content moderation decisions and censorship regulations.

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Instagram to automatically censor “a predefined list of offensive terms”

Meta-owned Instagram plans to introduce new features that will censor “offensive” direct message (DM) requests and Story replies and warn users before replying to comments that “could be offensive.”

The feature that censors DM requests and Story replies that are deemed to be offensive is called “Hidden Words.” It was introduced last year but was only enabled when creators turned it on and only applied to DM requests. Instagram now plans to test automatically turning on Hidden Words for all creator accounts and expanding it to Story replies.

Hidden Words uses a “predefined list of offensive terms” and filters DM requests and Story replies that contain these terms into a separate hidden requests folder. Instagram says it worked with “leading anti-discrimination and anti-bullying organizations” to develop the list of terms.

Users of Hidden Words can also create their own list of custom words, phrases, or emojis that they want filtered from DM requests and Story replies. However, the predefined list of terms that was developed by Instagram and the anti-discrimination and anti-bullying organizations isn’t revealed to users.

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New Research Reveals Tiktok, Instagram And Meta Can Monitor Keystrokes, Seize Passwords And Credit Card Information

Recent research has revealed that social media platforms Tiktok, Instagram, and Meta, can pry on users’ personal information when it is entered into the in-app browser.

Felix Krause, a software engineer, and security researcher looked into the coding built into Tiktok, the Chinese-produced app’s infrastructure, which led to his shocking revelation.

Users who click on links on Tiktok are led to a native in-app browser produced by Tiktok, and not default browsers like Safari or Google Chrome.

The JavaScript code in Tiktok’s in-app browser can allow the company to monitor every keystroke. This means the social media company could access every action taken on the screen, even passwords or credit card information.

Krause explained that while Tiktok allegedly does not have the feature enabled at this moment, the infrastructure is in place. “Installing a keylogger is obviously a huge thing… according to TikTok it’s disabled at the moment. The problem is they do have the infrastructure and the systems in place to be able to track all these keystrokes… that on its own is a huge problem.”

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Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ Becomes Reality as Facebook Now Allows Violence & Hate Directed at Russians

Over the last 6 years, Facebook, now Meta, has clamped down on any and all calls for violence by users on its platform. Users who advocated for violence were banned and some of them were reported to authorities in the company’s attempt to make its platform a more peaceful place. But all that has changed now as the world slips into a scene from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.

On Thursday night, Reuters reported that Meta Platforms will now allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians in what they refer to as a “temporary change to its hate speech policy.”

Users can now openly advocate for the assassination of world leaders, so long as they are considered political enemies of the West. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko are fair game in Meta’s new world.

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’ We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement.

If the user gets too detailed about how and where they are going to kill these Russians, only then will Facebook and Instagram draw the line.

Citing the Reuters story, Russia’s US embassy demanded that Washington stop the “extremist activities” of Meta allowing its users to call for violence.

“Users of Facebook & Instagram did not give the owners of these platforms the right to determine the criteria of truth and pit nations against each other,” the embassy said on Twitter Thursday night in response to the change.

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Meta changes policy, says Facebook and Instagram users may call for violence against Russians, Putin’s assassination

Users of Facebook and Instagram in certain countries will be temporarily allowed to call for and threaten violence against Russian citizens and Russian troops, according to a new report.

In a change to Meta‘s hate speech policy, users in these countries will be able to make such posts only in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Reuters, citing internal emails.

“The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland,” the report from Reuters says. “These calls for the leaders’ deaths will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, such as the location or method.”

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Instagram says it will cut the reach of posts that are “likely” to contain “hate speech”

Instagram is introducing more vaguely defined restrictions on its users, this time acting “proactively” to lower Feed posts and Stories that “may” contain bullying or hate speech, or those which “may” encourage violence – as well as content that is “potentially upsetting.”

In a blog post, Facebook’s platform said that this means the already existing policy of reducing the reach of posts determined to contain misinformation by third-party “fact-checkers” – and all posts from accounts that are said to have shared misinformation “repeatedly” – is being expanded.

It is Instagram’s “systems” that will be tasked with making the distinction between what “may” or is “likely” or “potentially” contains hate speech and represents bullying. The blog post explains that (algorithms) will make these decisions by comparing captions – if a caption is similar to another that was already found to be violating the platform’s rules, then the post will be pushed down Feeds and Stories.

Instagram also said that the new policy, that smacks of shadow-banning, affects individual posts and not accounts themselves, and that posts Instagram actually thinks break its rules, rather than suspect them to, will be removed, as before.

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Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The US Government

Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of US sanctions and must therefore be removed.

In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization. Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.

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Instagram and Facebook block quote from Thomas Paine for “false information”

What if social media existed in the Dark Ages? Users posting a quote by an Enlightenment era figure, and getting censored for it, might have just gotten some idea of what that would be like.

Facebook’s “dumb algorithms” are most likely (or at least, hopefully) behind the decision to “fact check” and censor none other than a quote by Thomas Paine, an 18th century Anglo-American figure whose work was instrumental in inspiring the declaration of independence of the United States.

Even in the current climate of out of control online censorship, it would be a bitter pill to swallow if it turned out there was a human behind this particular decision.

Whatever the case, multiple Facebook and Instagram users were saying on Twitter on Monday and Tuesday that their posts were either removed or that they had their accounts temporarily blocked for uploading a picture of Paine and his quote, reading, “He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”

According to Facebook’s censorship machine, that is false information, worthy of bans and deletions.

The irony of yet another instance of suppression of speech is particularly painful here (no pun intended) given Paine’s own pro-freedom, individual liberty and human rights, as well as anti-slavery stances, that made him a prominent Enlightenment figure.

Well, those quoting him today on social media, like evolutionary biologist Colin Wright are discovering that they live in a different era – where Instagram informs them that their stories containing the image and the quote had been removed for “false information” that goes against the giant’s community guidelines.

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