Tag: social media

Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea

Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.

A narrative in flux: Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19 after the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in late 2019 with symptoms consistent with the virus. The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.

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CENSORED: National Vaccine Information Center

A highly-rated nonprofit vaccine safety charity has been censored by Facebook on behalf of pharmaceutical industry interests in a purge of vaccine safety information.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) had maintained a Facebook page since 2008.

The organization was started 39-years ago. Co-founder and president is Barbara Loe Fisher. Fisher became a vaccine safety advocate after her two-and-a-half-year-old son suffered a severe neurological reaction to DPT vaccine in 1980. He was left with multiple learning disabilities that required him to remain in a special education classroom throughout his public school education.

Far from a fringe group, as propagandists try to convince the public, Fisher has provided consumers with crucial vaccine safety information for decades and served as an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee as part of the Vaccine Safety Writing Group, on the agency’s Vaccine Policy Analysis Collaborative, on the Blue Ribbon Panel on Vaccine Safety, and Chair of the Subcommittee on Vaccine Adverse Events.

Additionally, Fisher has served as a member of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. And she has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Forum.

We are not surprised that Mark Zuckerberg views the truthful information that NVIC publishes about vaccine science, policy and law as a threat to perpetuating false narratives about vaccine safety created by the pharmaceutical industry and its business partners. The U.S Congress has encouraged the creation of public-private business partnerships between vaccine manufacturers and federal agencies for the past three decades. In order to be part of those lucrative partnerships, Silicon Valley companies like Facebook are clearly happy to engage in censorship. If NVIC had not done such a good job educating the public about vaccination and health for four decades, our Facebook page would still be up.

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China Arrests Three for Allegedly Insulting Dead Rice Scientist

Police in China arrested three people over the weekend for allegedly posting remarks online deemed “insulting” to late Chinese agronomist Yuan Longping, credited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with curbing famine in the country.

“Two netizens, one in Beijing and another in North China’s Tianjin Municipality, were both found to have posted a number of insulting remarks about Yuan on Wechat [a Chinese social media platform] on Saturday [May 22], which were reported to police,” China’s state-run Global Times reported on May 23, one day after Yuan died at age 91.

“Those derogatory posts had caused ‘seriously bad’ impact on the society, according to a statement issued by police [sic]. Both people have been detained and an investigation is now underway,” the newspaper wrote.

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Facebook Whistleblowers Reveal Campaign To Censor Vaccine Hesitancy

Whistleblower organization Project Veritas has obtained internal documents from Facebook insiders detailing the company’s efforts to censor concerns over the COVID-19 vaccine.

Leaked company documents provided by two whistleblowers detail Facebook’s plan to combat “vaccine hesitancy” (VH) worldwide via “comment demotion”.

“They’re trying to control this content before it even makes it onto your page before you even see it,” one insider told Project Veritas. “If I lose my job, it’s like, what do I do? But that’s less of a concern to me.”

The social media giant’s goal is to “reduce user exposure” to those with VH, while also reducing the ability to engage with said posts.

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HATE HOAX: Police reports show black Minnesota high schooler sent racist messages to black students

Police in Minnesota have used forensics to determine that the creator of an Instagram account from which racist private messages to black students was a black female student at White Bear Lake High School.

In yet another “hate hoax” incident, it appears that the girl was sending racist messages to other black female students, although police could only confirm that she was the one who created the account. As far as individual messages go, they can, however, confirm that the messages did originate from her home IP.

According to The College Fix, the messages were virulently threatening and racist in nature, containing such phrases as “die, ni**er”, among others.

One message said, ‘Go back to Africa. With your tribe.’ Another post said, ‘GET HANGED. DIE. KILL YOURSELF,” KSTP-TV reported.

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Doctor’s message about low pediatric deaths from COVID blocked by Facebook

Facebook removed a comment by a doctor on the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths. Facebook claimed the comment violated it “Community Standards on Spam.”

A Facebook user asked about the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths in the month of April. Dr. Tracy Høeg, a sports, spine, and regenerative medicine doctor, responded with factual information from the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and even included a graph.

“Part of the reason I have (for the most part) left Facebook is they delete my post/responses that are factual, which I triple check,” Dr. Tracy Høeg wrote in a May 20 Facebook post. “I was responding to a question about what the number of pediatric deaths were due to COVID in April. I don’t feel like directly citing numbers from CDC and AAP should be deleted as spam, but maybe that is just me. I have moved to Twitter FYI.”

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How Facebook uses ‘fact-checking’ to suppress scientific truth

At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high-school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events.

But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social-media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social-media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

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Pentagon launches program to surveil military personnel’s social media

The Pentagon is planning on launching a program that would screen military personnel’s social media for “extremist material” — looking to retain a private firm to do the digging in order to circumvent First Amendment protections, according to a report.

Internal Defense Department documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that Bishop Garrison, a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tasked with addressing “extremism” in the armed forces, is currently in the process of designing a social media screening program which will “continuously” monitor for “concerning behaviors.”

In the past, the Pentagon has shied away from surveilling members due to First Amendment protections, as well as other privacy concerns.

This program, according to the outlet, citing a senior Pentagon official, will rely on a private firm in order to avoid being accused of circumventing First Amendment restrictions through government.

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Biden Revokes Trump Order Protecting Users From Censorship on Social Media

President Joe Biden this week revoked an order from the previous Trump administration that sought to protect users from unfair or deceptive content restriction practices by Big Tech companies.

The effect of the revocation would require the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the heads of executive departments to take steps to rescind any regulations or policies that enforced former President Donald Trump’s executive order entitled “Preventing Online Censorship,” which was signed in May last year.

Trump’s order sought to prevent social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from moderating users’ content in what his administration said was being done in an unbalanced and inconsistent way. The order cited examples from Twitter that added “fact-checking labels” to certain tweets in a manner that the administration said clearly reflects political bias.

Twitter added a “fact-checking” label on two of Trump’s tweets two days before the president issued his executive order. Trump accused Twitter of “selectively applying” its warning labels, arguing such action amounted to political activism.

Biden’s order also seeks to roll back liability protections under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That law largely exempts online platforms from liability for content posted by their users, although they can be held liable for content that violates anti-sex trafficking or intellectual property laws.

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Biden Secretary of Defense adviser pick once said online misinformation is a digital “plague”

In an op-ed from 2018, Biden’s pick for senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense, Bishop Garrison, described free speech as a “digital black plague.”

In the 2018 op-ed, resurfaced by Revolver News, Garrison described alleged disinformation, which to others is free speech, as a “digital black plague,” which if allowed to “spread further,” soon “the shining city on the hill will undoubtedly find itself alone in the darkness for years to come.”

Garrison also said that technology was responsible for the spread of disinformation, which to some, is any information they don’t like.

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