Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 19, 2018
So when did showing the home of more than 70 people engulfed in flames after a FBI assault become beyond the pale? Facebook presumably blocked everyone who sought to share that image from the most vivid law enforcement debacle of the 1990s.
This was not the first time Facebook erased an iconic image that the U.S. government would be happy to see vanish.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/10/27/facebook-censored-cross-your-countrys-government-and-they-might-censor-you-too-james-bovard-column/795271001/
James Bovard, Opinion columnist
Responding to Russian-funded political advertisements, Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg declared last month that “we will do our part to defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation.” But Facebook is effectively sowing disinformation by kowtowing to foreign regimes and censoring atrocities such as ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. In the name of repressing fake news and hate speech, Facebook is probably suppressing far more information than Americans realize.
Facebook blocked a post of mine last month for the first time since I joined it nine years ago. I was seeking to repost a blog article I had written on Janet Reno, the controversial former attorney general who died last year. I initially thought that Facebook was having technical glitches (no novelty). But I checked the page and saw the official verdict: “Could not scrape URL because it has been blocked.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Censor, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Waco | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 16, 2018
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/08/michael-s-rozeff/an-argument-for-ending-patent-monopolies/
By Michael S. Rozeff
Google’s market power traces back to patents. Google has allegedly levered this economic power into politics by slanting its algorithms of search toward Hillary Clinton and away from Donald Trump. Google influences the presentation of political information. Among social media platforms, shadowbanning is another way to influence political discourse. A third way is the outright banning of platforms such as that of Alex Jones.
Reporter Allum Bokhari writes “Facebook claims to have boosted voter turnout by 3 percent in 2016 by making small tweaks to theiralgorithm. And studies have shown that if search engines like Google manipulated their results to favor particular candidates, they could sway up to 40 percent of undecided voters. The author of the same studies estimates that biased search results shifted between 2 and 3 million votes towards Hillary Clinton in 2016. How much more could they shift in 2020?” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: algorithms, Facebook, Google, patents, Shadowbanning | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 13, 2018
Once you’re assisting with the construction of the US military’s drone program, receiving grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, or having your site’s content regulated by NATO’s propaganda arm, you don’t get to pretend you’re a private, independent corporation that is separate from government power.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/10/in-a-corporatist-system-of-government-corporate-censorship-is-state-censorship/
By Caitlin Johnstone
Last year, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”
“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
Yes, this really happened.
Today Twitter has silenced three important anti-war voices on its platform: it has suspended Daniel McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, suspended Scott Horton of the Scott Horton Show, and completely removed the account of prominent Antiwar.com writer Peter Van Buren. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Alex Jones, corporate censorship, Corporatist System, Facebook, Google, InfoWars, State Censorship, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 10, 2018
In a free market, you express your opinion by refusing their services or products. You can boycott them or participate in boycotts. You can criticize them in media. You can patronize competitors. There are competitors right this minute for these censoring companies.
Their names are easy to find
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/08/michael-s-rozeff/the-free-market-will-take-care-of-companies-that-censor-content/
By Michael S. Rozeff
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al who are censoring people and content have a right to do that. Calling them monopolies or public utilities is the wrong way to go. Stressing their “power” is the wrong way to go, by which I mean it contradicts libertarian thinking about products and free markets. Worrying about free speech in the context of their censorship is likewise a losing and flawed argument. Forcing companies to provide a forum of free and/or diverse speech is not compatible with freedom… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: censoring, Facebook, Free Market, Twitter, Youtube | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 8, 2018
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/07/zero-transparency-6-questions-that-tech-giants-refuse-to-answer-about-the-infowars-ban/
by Allum Bokhari
…But Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube have offered, at most, only copy and paste explanations for why they banned InfoWars content from their platforms — or why, after months of pressure from the Democrats and CNN, they all came to the same decision on the same day. Questions about transparency have a much broader scope that just the case of InfoWars and Alex Jones. Beyond the banning of other individuals such as Tommy Robinson, the same questions apply to a whole host of actions by the Masters of the Universe, including partnering with foreign governments to shut down accounts, shadowbanning users to limit the scope of their engagement, and mass user purges.
Breitbart News sent the following questions to Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple earlier today, and have yet to receive a real answer for most of them. Apple and YouTube chose to provide the same canned statement they provided to all other media outlets who contacted them, while Facebook and Spotify ignored our request entirely.
THE QUESTIONS SILICON VALLEY WON’T ANSWER Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Apple, Facebook, InfoWars Ban, Spotify, Transparency, Youtube | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 8, 2018
We live in strange times. On one hand it is fashionable to hate capitalism these days… But on the other hand we seem content to trust Silicon Valley, the new frontier in corporate power, to make moral judgements about what kind of content people should be able to see online.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/alex-jones-and-the-rise-of-corporate-censorship/21658#.W2npJtIzaUm
So we’re now trusting the capitalist class, massive, unaccountable corporations, to decide on our behalf what we may listen to and talk about? This is the take-home message, the terrible take-home message, of the expulsion of Alex Jones’ Infowars network from Apple, Facebook and Spotify and of the wild whoops of delight that this summary banning generated among so-called liberals: that people are now okay with allowing global capitalism to govern the public sphere and to decree what is sayable and what is unsayable. Corporate censorship, liberals’ new favourite thing – how bizarre. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Alex Jones, Apple, corporate censorship, Facebook, Spotify, Youtube | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 7, 2018
Looks, sounds, smells like socialism…government using social media platforms to control what is fed to the unwashed masses (you and me).
The Chris Murphys will decide what is truth. Don’t worry your little heads.
There is much truth in what InfoWars spews. The Chris Murphys protesteth too much.
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/08/07/sen-chris-murphy-big-tech-must-do-more-than-take-down-infowars/
by John Nolte
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is calling on social media monopolies to “do more than take down one website,” meaning take down more websites on top of InfoWars, which was de-platformed by YouTube, Facebook, and others on Monday.
“Infowars [sic] is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart,” Murphy tweeted Monday afternoon. “These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it.”
Obviously, what Murphy sees here is an opportunity to go around the First Amendment, to kill free and open speech he disagrees with, and to accomplish that using social media giants as his hit squad. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Facebook, First Amendment, InfoWars, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, Youtube | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 7, 2018
Executives defend the decision not to share exactly what content violated a policy because they fear it will prompt people to test it.
Alex Jones as Josef K.
http://www.jamestownsun.com/entertainment/podcasts/4481888-apple-facebook-and-other-tech-companies-delete-content-alex-jones
By Washington Post
Major technology companies including Apple, Facebook and YouTube deleted years of content from conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars platforms over allegations of hate speech, a sudden clampdown that is fueling the growing debate over how big technology companies choose to censor…
The recent actions by the technology companies also highlight the opaque nature of their decision-making, with most not publicly specifying what content by Jones violated their policies or how they decided what posts to block and which to leave online. Jones has treaded close to some definitions of hate speech for years, and it wasn’t clear from the companies if or when he finally crossed the line… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Alex Jones, Apple, Facebook, InfoWars, Youtube | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 7, 2018
It seems that YouTube has now come up with a solution: ban the channels that Rep. Deutch objects to.
Scoundrel Alex Jones deserves more respect than any other organization mentioned below. At least he tells you there is a war on the truth.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/06/infowars-ban-cnn-democrats-successfully-lobby-big-tech-to-censor-their-critics/
by Allum Bokhari
Big tech’s coordinated purge of InfoWars — which was hit by bans from Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube in rapid succession — did not occur in a vacuum. On this issue, Silicon Valley bowed to CNN journalists and Democrat politicians who ceaselessly lobbied for the site to be censored.
It’s a sign of how the concentration of power in America has shifted from big government to big tech that politicians are now lobbying tech companies rather than the other way round, but that’s exactly what happened over the course of the past few months, as Democrats applied relentless pressure on Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants to censor InfoWars.
Chief among them was Democratic Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL), who demanded that a Facebook representative “explain” their decision not to ban InfoWars at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on social media censorship last month. Calling Jones as “well-known conspiracy theorist” whose “brand is bullying,” Deutch also demanded Google’s representative explain how many strikes it would take for a channel on Google-owned YouTube to be deleted… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Alex Jones, Apple, CNN, Facebook, InfoWars, Spotify, Youtube | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. Fox on August 6, 2018
…doesn’t “use purchase data from banks or credit card companies for ads.”
Well, maybe not now, maybe, but this indicates effort in that direction.
And you continue to spew your personal private information over Facebook because…? You are making it too easy for Mark Soros Zuckerberg.
https://www.axios.com/facebook-bank-data-privacy-1533569061-7fb8bc34-7351-4f3e-a2a2-2f9af61c8930.html
Facebook has had conversations with large American banks about getting access to their customers’ data for new features, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Why it matters: Facebook’s recent privacy controversies may collide with its attempts to keep users engaged, and the Journal reported that one of the banks had exited conversations with the company over privacy questions. A Facebook spokesperson told the newspaper that it doesn’t “use purchase data from banks or credit card companies for ads.”
Be seeing you
Yah, MORE! That’s what I want, MORE!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: banking data, Facebook, Privacy, Soros | Leave a Comment »
