Most online recruitment in sex trafficking cases occurs on Facebook: analysis

The majority of online recruitment in sex trafficking cases last year took place on Facebook, according to a new report.

The Human Trafficking Institute on Tuesday said in its annual report that 59 percent of online recruitment of victims occurred on Facebook, along with 65 percent of child victims.

“The internet has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims, and they often recruit them on a number of very common social networking websites,” Victor Boutros, CEO of the Human Trafficking Institute, told CBS News on Wednesday.

“Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases,” he added.

In a statement to CBS News, Facebook said: “Sex trafficking and child exploitation are abhorrent and we don’t allow them on Facebook. We have policies and technology to prevent these types of abuses and take down any content that violates our rules.”

Keep reading

Instagram is forcing users to remove satirical posts about Fauci emails

Shortly after Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails were published by BuzzFeed and The Washington Post after Freedom of Information Act requests, Facebook and Instagram started to suppress mentions and screenshots of them after they were flagged by its third-party “fact checkers.”

Now, Instagram is using these third-party fact checks to flag satirical posts about these emails and force users to delete them.

Luke Rudkowski, founder of the independent news outlet We Are Change, reported that when he shared a post that jokes about Fauci recommending “face masks over your eyes so you can’t read his leaked emails” on Instagram, he was told it was “missing context” based on a fact check from USA Today.

Keep reading

Facebook “fact checkers” used a letter organized by Wuhan lab backer to “debunk” leak theory and censor allegations, report says

It has emerged that Facebook’s “independent” fact-checkers used a letter organized by a major Wuhan Institute of Virology backer to “debunk” articles suggesting that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.

Facebook recently announced it would no longer flag posts linking the origins of the pandemic to China and the Wuhan Lab.

Since the start of the pandemic over a year ago, Facebook, and other social media platforms, have been flagging posts suggesting the virus leaked from a lab. The social media giant relies on independent fact-checkers to “debunk” conspiracy theories.

In the case of the lab leak theory, it relied on an article by Science Feedback, which “debunked” an opinion piece by Steven Mosher, published in the New York Post on February 23 2020, titled, “Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab.

The Science Feedback article cited a letter published in leading medical journal The Lancet, signed by “27 eminent public health experts.”

Keep reading

The COVID Censorship Consensus

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made,” Facebook conceded, after the theory of a Chinese lab leak gained fresh currency.

It was not the first time that an idea suppressed by the Silicon Curtain had been revived despite the best efforts of the Big Tech monopoly to suppress it.

But Facebook warned that it will go on censoring to “keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge,”

Wherever these new facts and trends emerge from, it won’t be from its platforms.

The social media monopoly isn’t admitting that it was wrong. What it’s actually saying is that it’s up to high level authorities to decide what is true and what people can be allowed to say.

Keep reading

New Findings on COVID-19 Origins Prove Big Tech Censorship is a Danger to Seeking Truth

In 2020, anyone who shared information on social media about anything related to COVID-19 and the lab in Wuhan, China or that mentioned the possibility that COVID-19 was man-made, saw their post removed and may have even been banned. Facebook, Twitter, Google, the establishment media, and many in the government made it their primary mission to “dispel misinformation” over the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

The arbiters of truth in Big Tech claimed and vehemently pushed the idea — based only on theories — that the COVID-19 virus originated in nature, and anyone who challenged or questioned this view was a dangerous conspiracy theorist.

Twitter even took to completely removing the account of a Chinese virologist who came forward with these claims. Dr Li-Meng Yan, who was reportedly a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health, had her Twitter account suspended after she claimed the coronavirus was created in a lab and put forth a trove of data to back up her claims.

Just one year ago, CNN put out a hit piece claiming that “Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump’s theory on the origins of the coronavirus.” Anyone who claimed otherwise was fact-checked into oblivion, their profiles banned, and if they had pages, their reach was diminished to nothing, if not entirely removed.

It was established. The fact checkers were correct and anyone who challenged them was a danger to society. But the fact checkers who dismissed this information did not do so with “facts” at all. Instead, they simply promoted one theory over another. And now, they are eating their words.

Last May, Washington Post’s Fact Checker team reported that the “balance of the scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the new coronavirus emerged from nature,” and their article was used to warn readers on Facebook who may have shared information which challenged this theory.

However, as the Washington Post just reported, last week, a group of 18 preeminent scientists published a letter in the journal Science saying a new investigation is needed, because “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.”

Now, Dr. Fauci has changed his stance on the matter, stating that these claims of lab origination somehow hold water a year later — despite “crushing” them last year.

Keep reading