Another nearby page deals with the broader topic of Media Bias in general.

Many young people get news and opinions from social media rather than television or other mass media, but social media sites engage in bias and censorship, just as TV and newspapers have for years.

Related topics:
Privacy issues on Facebook
News about Google
Habitual dependence on cell phones
Anything you have ever said can be used against you

Overview:
How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech.  Like it or not, social media is the communication form of the future — not just in the U.S., but worldwide.  Just Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people.  More than two-thirds of all Americans (68 percent) use Facebook.  YouTube is pushing out TV as the most popular place to watch video.  Google is the No. 1 search engine in both the U.S. and the world.  War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing — badly.  If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media.  It's the new battleground of media bias.  But it's worse.  That bias is not a war of ideas.  It's a war against ideas.  It's a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation.

Despite Twitter's Protests, The Stifling of Conservative Speech On The Platform Is Real.  About a year ago, many of us on the political right saw impressions of our tweets drop precipitously — sometimes in the millions per month — while follower counts were increasing or remaining stagnant.  With our visibility on the platform reduced, our ability to grow our Twitter presence has flatlined completely.  Because of Twitter's importance to the political debate in America, this is no trivial matter.  Our ability to influence the debate in real-time has been squelched.  While it does not outright censor expressions of conservative views, Twitter has admitted to using a complex and opaque Quality Filter algorithm that has the effect of disproportionately restricting the voices of conservatives under the guise of limiting harmful or abusive users.  Many Twitter users refer to this throttling as a "shadowban."

A word to the wise:  Overthrow your tech overlords while you still can.  Sure we love our smartphones, but is that any reason to surrender our freedom to think for ourselves?  The more dependent we become on Google, Twitter and Facebook for information, the less certain we can be that we are looking at the real world and not the manufactured Matrix deemed suitable for adult consumption by Silicon Valley.  What price are you willing to pay for the convenience of unlimited access to limited truth?  These questions arise this week, as they have almost every week for the past decade, as the evidence mounts that search engines and social media are not just a conduit of reality, but a filter of it.  There is the whole truth, and then there is the Google Truth.  More and more, we are getting the Google Truth, and the devil take the hindmost.

Michelle Malkin Shreds Twitter:  Biased Algorithm 'Triggering Lockdowns... if You Use the Wrong Phrases'.  Michelle Malkin warned of technology companies' tightening control over the parameters of political speech and expression during a Wednesday interview with Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour on SiriusXM's Breitbart News Tonight.  Malkin's comments came against the backdrop of Wednesday's [9/12/2018] publishing of a leaked video from 2016 depicting Google's leadership lamenting the election of President Donald Trump and pledging global political opposition to both nationalism and populism.  [Audio clip]

Jeff Sessions 'Exploring Potential Investigation' of Google, Facebook, Twitter.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reportedly "exploring a potential investigation" of Big Tech social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google.  According to Bloomberg, Sessions will "be briefed on Sept. 25 by Republican state attorneys general who are already examining the firms' practices," and will "help Sessions decide if there's a federal case to be made against companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. for violating consumer-protection or antitrust laws."

#WalkAway Founder Brandon Straka Banned From Facebook.  Brandon Straka, the founder of the #WalkAway movement has been banned from Facebook for linking to Infowars ahead of being interviewed by the outlet.  Straka's ban comes as he is planning a #WalkAway march on Washington this October.  The movement is for Democrats who are leaving the party over their increasingly ridiculous antics.

Twitter blocks posts that use phrase 'illegal alien' as 'hateful content'.  The federal government, U.S. Supreme Court, and lawyers across the country use the word "illegal alien" to describe immigrants who illegally enter the country, because that's the definition in the law.  But Twitter makes its own laws, and the social media giant is now blocking folks from promoting any messages with the phrase, which its moderators apparently consider "hate speech."

The glory days may be dead and gone for social media giants.  We all know you can "like" or "share" something on Facebook, but it turns out more and more people are instead hitting the "delete" button and taking down their accounts altogether.  According to a new survey from Pew Research, some 26 percent of Americans have wiped their phones clean of the social media platform over the past year; another 54 percent have adjusted their privacy settings, and 42 percent claim to have taken a break from the site for several weeks or more.  These actions came on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and suggest that Facebook's careless and dishonest handling of user information came back to bite them.

The Broken Soapbox.  Social media entered our world with a promising offer: you can communicate here — with virtually everyone on Earth. [...] But now social media have a near monopoly on public discourse, and the age of censorship has arrived.  Ideas and messages that once were tolerable are now forbidden.  Users have spent a decade or more building their audience with a consistent message — and thus filling the platform-owners' pockets — and now find themselves banned when their message hasn't changed.  In no other arena of commerce would owners be considered justified in arbitrarily changing the rules to exclude certain customers, particularly if the reasons were amorphous, largely unexplained, and applied to a certain type of customer and not to others.

Twitter Permanently Suspends Alex Jones and InfoWars After Jones Confronts CNN's Deplatforming Crusader Oliver Darcy.  Oliver Darcy has been a naked activist crusading to get a host of accounts, including Jones' most of all, banned from Twitter, FaceBook, etc.  Oliver Darcy and CNN have abandoned any pretense of objectivity and are simply now activists and lobbyists pressuring other companies to ban their critics and competitors.  Until recently, Twitter had been the lone hold-out, refusing to ban Jones, stating that he had not broken any rules.  Which made Darcy and CNN crusade all the harder to get Jones banned, writing stories frequently demanding that Twitter get with the deplatforming program.

Alex Jones Banned From Twitter, Louis Farrakhan and Hamas Remain.  On Thursday [9/6/2018], Twitter permanently suspended conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and InfoWars from Twitter and Periscope.  This followed Jones' altercation with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) outside of the hearing with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.  Some have accused Twitter of applying a double standard, however, since both notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan and the terrorist organization Hamas still have accounts on the platform.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Confirms 'Algorithms Unfairly Filtered Out 600,000 Accounts'.  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that his company's algorithms "were unfairly filtering 600,000 accounts, including some members of Congress," from search results based on the type of followers they had.  Dorsey confirmed that 600,000 accounts were shadowbanned during his hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday [9/5/2018].  "In the spirit of accountability and transparency: recently we failed our intended impartiality.  Our algorithms were unfairly filtering 600,000 accounts, including some members of Congress, from our search auto-complete and latest results," claimed Dorsey.

Twitter Suspends Benghazi Hero For Mocking Obama, Liberals.  Twitter suspended former Army Ranger and Benghazi hero Kris Paronto over the weekend for mocking former President Barack Obama and liberals after another Twitter account claimed that Obama killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.  The incident happened after a far-left Twitter account told Robert J. O'Neill — the Navy SEAL who is credited with killing bin Laden — that it was Obama who killed the Islamic terrorist.

Freed From Twitter Jail, Benghazi Hero Kris Paronto Thanks Trump Jr.  For Powerful Obama Smackdown.  In his campaign speech on Friday [9/7/2018], former president Barack Obama dismissed Republican "wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi."  Benghazi survivor Kris Paronto naturally took offense, and soon found himself suspended on Twitter.  Donald Trump Jr. later joined in denouncing Obama's remarks, earning thanks from Paronto.  After Obama's attack on Benghazi "conspiracy theories," the Benghazi survivor blasted the former president on Twitter.

WSJ: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Personally Decides Who Gets Blacklisted.  The Wall Street Journal published an article recently outlining the efforts Twitter has made to crack down on "bad actors" on its platform, including the personal involvement of CEO Jack Dorsey in deciding who gets blacklisted.  An article published in the Wall Street Journal titled "Inside Twitter's Long, Slow Struggle to Police Bad Actors," outlines how Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey personally stepped in to make decisions on the banning of high-profile accounts, regularly frustrating Twitter employees.  The article states that Twitter primarily relies on reports from users to police their platform and decisions on whether to ban accounts are then made by reviewing a consistent set of policies relating to the platform's rules.

Majority leader partners with Trump to 'stop the bias' and censoring of conservatives.  Ahead of expected hearings on Capitol Hill by social media companies, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been actively promoting a campaign to "stop the bias."  The California Republican has targeted alleged discrimination against conservatives on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, leading Republicans in the charge while echoing President Donald Trump who shared a video message and the hashtag #StopTheBias last week.

CNN Boosts Left-Wing Campaign to Censor Breitbart; Approves 'Blacklisting'.  CNN swept aside journalistic ethics on Sunday by endorsing a blacklisting campaign with a glowing interview of Matt Rivitz, the founder of Sleeping Giants, a failed effort to censor Breitbart News by harassing and intimidating companies whose advertisements may (or may not) have appeared on the website.  The interview took place on Reliable Sources, a Sunday morning show that once focused on analyzing the media, but which in recent years has been turned into the editorial mouthpiece of CNN president Jeff Zucker, voiced through host Brian Stelter.

Hall Monitor Nation.  Last May, I was notified by Facebook's Julia Smekalina that "one of your posts was reported and found to be in violation of our Community Standards."  Little Nazi block watchers are constantly reporting conservatives.  They can't just stop following people they don't like.  Liberals used to mock fundamentalist Christians, claiming they feared that someone, somewhere, may be happy.  Now they're the ones haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, may disagree with them.

Social Media Censorship II.  On CNN last week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said, "I think we need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is left, is more left-leaning."  At least Dorsey admits that.  Usually, powerful social media platforms push their political agendas while pretending not to have any.  Roy Spencer, author of "Climate Confusion," points out that when he does a Google search for "climate skepticism," the first 10 pages aren't links to skepticism.  Instead, they're links to articles criticizing climate change skepticism.

Save the Culture from the Modern Vandals.  Time was when Bowdlerism and pecksniffery were alleged to be characteristics of conservative Christians and small-town Babbitts: reactionary squares from Squaresville, who couldn't handle a little overt sexuality or transgressive humor from the likes of Lenny Bruce.  These days, the censorship comes almost exclusively from the perpetually outraged cultural-Marxist Left.  Like their Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian forebears, they cannot abide anything that does not conform to their world-view right this minute, and therefore must constantly update their "Index of Forbidden Books, Films, Words, and Cultural Artifacts."

Oops: Net Neutrality Advocates Just Made The Case For Regulating Google And Facebook.  This week a coalition of internet giants — including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter and others — urged a U.S. appeals court to reinstate federal "net neutrality" regulations on internet service providers.  But when it comes to keeping the internet "free and open," those companies are among the worst offenders.

Trump: 'We As a Country Cannot Tolerate Political Censorship, Blacklisting, and Rigged Search Results'.  Speaking at a campaign rally in Indiana Thursday night [8/30/2018], President Trump added a new element to his stump speech — political censorship.  He told the crowd that his administration is standing up for the free speech rights of all Americans, liberals and conservatives alike.

Dozens at Facebook Unite to Challenge Its 'Intolerant' Liberal Culture.  The post went up quietly on Facebook's internal message board last week.  Titled "We Have a Problem With Political Diversity," it quickly took off inside the social network.  "We are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views," Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, which was obtained by The New York Times.  "We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology."  Since the post went up, more than 100 Facebook employees have joined Mr. Amerige to form an online group called FB'ers for Political Diversity, according to two people who viewed the group's page and who were not authorized to speak publicly.  The aim of the initiative, according to Mr. Amerige's memo, is to create a space for ideological diversity within the company.

Cuomo: We Shouldn't Care About Censoring Conservatives Online.  Former White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short appeared on Cuomo Prime Time on Tuesday [8/28/2018].  He brought the case for scrutiny into social media and other web companies based on recent evidence that they are collectively censoring conservatives.  CNN's Chris Cuomo claimed he cared about conservative voices allegedly being silenced, but not really.  To him, it was all just another distraction from whatever he thought the 'real issue' was, a distraction Trump was using to his advantage.  Cuomo's next brilliant leap in logic was that if Trump is tweeting about it, it doesn't really matter.  And, according to him, Fox News was behind it all.

Zuckerberg's dissent from within:  Facebook group rips left-wing 'monoculture'.  Facebook employees apparently do not agree with Mark Zuckerberg's pronouncements on the ideological tolerance of the company.  An internal post titled "We Have a Problem With Political Diversity" — a rebuke of the idea that Facebook offers an environment conducive to the free exchange of ideas — was shared this week with The New York Times.  "We are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views," Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, the newspaper reported Tuesday [8/28/2018].  "We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology."

Facebook engineer reveals how colleagues 'attack — often in mobs — anyone who opposes left-leaning ideology'.  A senior Facebook engineer has revealed the firm's aggressive 'left-leaning' culture in a damning memo that levels a series of damaging claims against the firm.  Brian Amerige alleges that colleagues 'attack — often in mobs' anyone who is not left-leaning, tear down Trump posters and demand HR investigates anyone who criticizes Islam's human rights record.  Amerige issued his rallying cry in an internal memo that has sparked a group called FB'ers for Political Diversity which has already attracted hundreds of members, and complaints from other members of staff for being offensive to minorities.

New Website Documents Biased Facebook Censorship.  That the meme "Facebook Jail" has become so popular, especially among conservatives, who make up at least 90% of its inmate population, is a sad commentary on the times we live in.  Many who rely on this social media leviathan for exposure and, concomitantly, a living are finding themselves blocked, banned, or censored.  Some users have even had their accounts disabled for no good reason and without explanation or appeal.  Now a new site has emerged that seeks to swap the roles of the jailer and jailed.  Its name, Facecrook Jail, is a riff on the meme, and it not only documents instances of bias, censorship, and abuse by Facebook but also lets users share their own experiences and grievances with the social media site.

Senior Facebook Engineer Admits "We Tear Down Posters Welcoming Trump Supporters".  It's no secret that the Silicon Valley tech giants discriminate against conservatives and conservative content.  On Tuesday [8/28/2018] President Trump warned Google about it's biased practices against conservatives and conservative content in their search feature.

Trump threatens action against Google for 'rigged' search results.  President Trump, chafing against news coverage he says is unfair, accused search-engine operator Google of suppressing positive stories about him and threatening a government response.  "This is a very serious serious situation — will be addressed," he wrote on Twitter, the social media platform where he has more than 50 million followers.  The president and congressional Republicans have all accused tech companies based in liberal-leaning Silicon Valley of suppressing news favorable to them, a claim that firm executives have denied in a number of hearings.  What action the president might attempt wasn't immediately clear.  Constitutional guarantees bar the government from restricting freedom of speech or the press, but those don't apply to the actions of private companies or individuals.  Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all denied presenting content in a way that favors either end of the political spectrum.

Google Responds To Trump Vowing Action Against 'RIGGED' Search Results.  President Trump vowed to take action against Google early Tuesday morning in response to a report suggesting that the search engine's algorithm was suppressing conservative outlets' coverage of Trump.

Youtube Buries Ann Coulter Video To Prevent Users From Finding It.  This is a perfect example of how big tech firms like Facebook, Google, and Youtube fashion their code to prevent conservatives from being found in search results and how viewers are given all liberal sources instead.  The folks at Information Liberation did a search for an Ann Coulter video entitled "How Trump Should Deal With Cohen & Manafort — Ann Coulter."  This video featured the best selling author's appearance on C-Span last week where she slammed Big Tech for its bias against conservatives.

Searching for unbiased news:  Trump rips Google as 'rigged'.  It seems like just about everyone is unhappy with Google at one time or another, given its dominant role in helping the world sort through the endless flood of online information.  Politicians, journalists, entertainers, business owners and others all want their names, links, articles and videos to come up higher in the searches.  For some, it's a matter of political life and death; for others, a matter of business survival; for still others, a question of sheer ego.  If you're pushed way down in the rankings, then as a practical matter, you don't exist.  President Trump has loudly added his voice, taking to Twitter to attack the search giant.

The Gathering Civil Liberties Storm.  Yesterday morning [2/23/2018], Facebook took down all five of my posts, declaring each time that "We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn't follow our Community Standards."  Really?  Here are the "radical" links I posted: [...] Many Facebook friends have had the same experience yesterday, with no explanations.

Fahrenheit 404.  Recently, Apple, Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube (owned by Google's parent, Alphabet) almost simultaneously tried to erase Infowars from existence (so-called deplatforming).  Libertarians and some Republican candidates for the U.S. Congress in the 2018 elections were similarly excommunicated soon after.  In a week, numerous conservatives got permanently banned from Twitter. [...] The fact is that these internet companies created a cartel to get rid of dissenters.  Exile from the virtual space does not mean the end of the world for the victims.  Also, there was no "double standard" about dissenters from these companies.  These sites from the very beginning were created as platforms for spreading exclusively leftist ideas, but for some time, they just closed their eyes to dissenters.  However, the defeat in the elections in 2016 led the leaders of these companies to the conclusion that without the organization of an anti-conservative cartel, the elections of 2018 will be lost, too.

The Editor says...
Upon reading the article above, I had the brilliant idea that I should acquire the website 101km.com — but alas, I'm too late!

Facebook Censorship Strikes Again.  As I wrote [elsew]here, the Left is outsourcing censorship of the internet to the tech companies of Silicon Valley, all of which are happily — if you are a leftist — run by liberals.  What the government can't do, on account of the First Amendment, private companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can do with impunity.  Increasingly, conservatives are persona non grata on social media platforms.

Google-Facebook 'Can Shift 12 Million Votes This Election'.  A study of the how Google and Facebook are manipulating the political views of their users shows internet tech giants have the power to shift "upwards of 12 million votes" in November's midterm elections, psychologist Robert Epstein told Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson.

The Dark, Ugly Truth About Google is Oozing Out.  Though I have been an outspoken critic of Google for a long time — dating back more than 10 years — I figured out only last year that what I call the "Speech Code Cartel" of Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Apple, along with other tech companies, represents the gravest threat to American liberty in the history of the country.  Unlike weapons of mass destruction that kill us all, this is another kind of WMD — a weapon of mass delusion — one that stealthily kills our freedom and the individual spirit that made America great.

We are Slaves to the Children of the Lie.  Just this week MasterCard and Patreon pulled services from conservative David Horowitz Freedom Center and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.  David Horowitz exposes communists who hate America, and Robert Spencer exposes radical Islamists who hate the West.  Horowitz and Spencer were targeted by the radical, evil organization the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).  The SPLC pretends to oppose "hate," but actually spreads hate and defamation, with the support of the media and government.

David Horowitz:  Visa, Mastercard Cut Off Payments to My Think Tank Based on SPLC 'Hate Group' Label.  The David Horowitz Freedom Center has had their donation processing system blocked by Visa and Mastercard allegedly following a campaign by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Visa has since contacted Breitbart News to deny involvement in the blacklisting of the Freedom Center.  The David Horowitz Freedom Center stated in a recent email that its ability to accept donations by credit card has been disabled by both Visa and Mastercard following a campaign by the SPLC to label the Freedom Center as a hate group.  This situation comes shortly after Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch was forced off the funding platform Patreon following pressure from Mastercard.

A Facebook Story.  [I]f being silenced — banned — on Facebook is my lot, I am sure I will be only one of many.

This Is What 'Election Interference' Actually Looks Like.  The purge of the right on social media was once a slow trickle, with high-profile bans happening only occasionally, and then subsiding.  With just three months until the midterm elections, the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley have turned online censorship into a cascade.  Earlier this month, Alex Jones was blacklisted on virtually every major social media service, including Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, and even Pinterest and Linkedin.  Following pressure from CNN and Media Matters, Twitter eventually followed suit with a week-long suspension.

Facebook censored my column — and I still can't find out why.  At 7:55 a.m.  Thursday morning [8/23/2018], I posted a story I had written for The New York Post on both Facebook and Twitter.  It was a reported piece on how people who voted for President Trump were feeling after both former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen found themselves on the wrong side of the law.  Within two hours I started receiving a handful of notes from people who are friends on my personal Facebook page that their posting of my piece, entitled "Why Trump's supporters won't care about Cohen and Manafort," had been removed.  Sometimes the removal was accompanied by a message from Facebook.  "Spam" was the most common reason given, but a couple of people were told Facebook removed the post because "it did not follow our Community Standards."

From One Psychodrama to Another.  The warping of the national media last week also crested with scant mention that Silicon Valley has redoubled their efforts to label expression it finds non-progressive as hate speech and find ways to ban it on their platforms.  At the same time, the national media coordinated its opinion pages in a simultaneous effort to voice its collective and scripted outrage that Donald Trump had done the unthinkable:  in crude fashion, he questions the very autonomy and integrity of the media.

Memo Reveals Soros-Funded Social-Media Censorship Plan.  The recent wave of censorship of conservative voices on the internet by tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Apple mirrors a plan concocted by a coalition of George Soros-funded, progressive groups to take back power in Washington from President Trump's administration.  A confidential, 49-page memo for defeating Trump by working with the major social-media platforms to eliminate "right wing propaganda and fake news" was presented in January 2017 by Media Matters founder David Brock at a retreat in Florida with about 100 donors, the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time.  On Monday [8/20/2018], the Gateway Pundit blog noted the memo's relationship with recent moves by Silicon Valley tech giants to "shadow ban" conservative political candidates and pundits and remove content.

Forget Russia, Twitter Is Meddling in 2018 Elections, Shadow-Banning GOP Candidates John James and Ron Bassilian.  A recent study by the leftist website VICE News found that Twitter was censoring top pro-Trump lawmakers.  Twitter is targeting pro-Trump Republican lawmakers Matt Gaetz, Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe with the same shadowbanning technique.  Twitter is also censoring prominent pro-Trump accounts including:  Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Paul Joseph Watson, TGP's Jim Hoft, TGP's Cassandra Fairbanks, TGP's Lucian Wintrich, TGP's Cristina Laila and Laura Loomer among others.

Guess How Many Hits WND Gets from Google Search.  Seven or eight years ago, it was not unusual for WND stories to be among the top breaking news stories in the main Google News display.  In at least the last five years, I can't recall ever seeing one WND story cited on its first page where daily, hourly, you will find the left-wing editorials of Huffington Post and Daily Beast topping the referrals, along with the New York Times, CNN and Washington Post.  You won't see the Daily Caller or Breitbart up there, either.  In other words, it's a systematic boycott of the independent media that is not sold out to the fake news left, the Democratic Party and the conspiracy mongers of global warming, Russian collusion and anti-Trump hysteria.

And They Wonder Why We're Angry.  America is experiencing a major culture war between its interpreters and the people. [...] The polarity is profound, and the interpreters believe they hold the upper hand with regard to education, the media, the government, the church, and the press.  These epistemological agents control the story dispensed to the people, and though they failed miserably in 2016, they believe they will in 2018 rise again to dictate outcomes for the people.  The interpreters decide what things mean.  Is something offensive?  Is something racist?  Is something sexist?  Is something homophobic or transphobic?  These decisions destroy the people's access to the public sphere and public legitimacy.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Admits Platform Is 'Left-Leaning'.  In the clip that aired on CNN, Dorsey defined shadowbanning, a practice many conservatives have complained has happened to them and that President Trump condemned on Saturday [8/18/2018], as "hiding that tweet from everyone without that person knowing about it."  Regarding recent criticism levied at the social media platform, Dorsey contended that Twitter does not police content, but rather behavior.

HUD sues Facebook, which could jeopardize all Internet ads.  HUD today sued Facebook for promoting illegal discrimination in housing.  This could be the first legal challenge to how Internet oligarchs target ads.  One man's tailoring ads to audiences is another man's discrimination.  The agency's press release said, "The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced today a formal complaint against Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act by allowing landlords and home sellers to use its advertising platform to engage in housing discrimination.  "HUD claims Facebook enables advertisers to control which users receive housing-related ads based upon the recipient's race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability, and/or zip code.  Facebook then invites advertisers to express unlawful preferences by offering discriminatory options, allowing them to effectively limit housing options for these protected classes under the guise of 'targeted advertising.'"  That triggered so much laughing that I had a coughing spell.

Facebook Censors Brigitte Gabriel Post Calling Accused Terrorist 'Sick and Depraved'.  Facebook censored the account of ACT! for America founder Brigitte Gabriel for publishing a post which called an accused terrorist who allegedly trained children to go on school shootings "sick and depraved."  "This is the smile of a sick and depraved Muslim terrorist who is back on the streets (on bail) after training children to shoot up schools," posted Gabriel in response to alleged terrorist Siraj Ibn Wahhaj.  "The judge who allowed this to happen should be removed from their [sic] post ASAP.  If he harms anyone while on bail, the blood is on their hands."

Robert Spencer:  Silicon Valley Blacklisting Conservatives 'with No Recourse, No Appeal, No Discussion'.  Robert Spencer, founder and director of Jihad Watch and author of "The History of Jihad:  From Muhammad to ISIS," warned of expanding online left-wing political censorship via large technology companies. [...] Spencer said, "The social media giants, now, have more control over the means of communication than the Soviet Union did in its heyday, or Nazi Germany, and they are pursuing a genuinely totalitarian initiative, and it's based largely on the work of Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a far-left group trying to demonize all dissent from the leftist agenda by lumping in legitimate conservative voices with groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis.  If you end up on the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate-group list, then the tech media giants will deplatform you on that basis with no recourse, no appeal, discussion; nothing."  [Audio clip]

Elizabeth Heng:  Big Tech Can 'Swing Elections as They Censor Conservative Voices'.  Elizabeth Heng, the Republican nominee running to represent California's 16th Congressional District, warned of left-wing technology companies' increasing capacity to determine electoral outcomes. [...] Earlier on Thursday [8/16/2018], Twitter blocked a campaign video advertisement of Heng's.  It described Heng's video as containing "inappropriate content" deemed "offensive, vulgar, or obscene."

Trump Goes Off On Social Media 'Censorship' and 'Discrimination' Against Conservative Voices.  2017 was a very challenging year for TGP.  Facebook and Twitter often altered their platforms to prevent TGP stories from being shared.  They have employed far left operatives who deem which stories are acceptable and others they kill off before they go viral.  Stories like 'Hillary is going to win in a landslide', 'Hillary is not sick' or 'Trump colluded with Russia' are considered accurate news reports.  These powerful tech firms act as gatekeepers and prevent conservative content from being shared online.

PragerU Claims They've Been Shadow Banned on Facebook.  YouTube video giant PragerU claims Facebook is shadow banning their account or intentionally suppressing their videos from follower news feeds.  According to PragerU, several videos were flagged as "hate speech" by Facebook.

Alex Jones Temporarily Blocked From Twitter.  The personal account of Alex Jones has been temporarily blocked on Twitter after one of his posts reportedly incited violence.  A spokesperson for the social networking site confirmed the action Tuesday [8/14/2018], stating the Infowars host has been placed in "read-only mode."

Twitter Suspends Gavin McInnes For Violating 'Violent Extremist' Policy; McInnes Responds.  The rationale for suspending the accounts, Twitter suggested in a statement, is that McInnes and his Proud Boys are a "violent extremist group."  "We can confirm that these accounts have been suspended from Twitter and Periscope for violating our policy prohibiting violent extremist groups," a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed in a statement.  In response to the suspension, McInnes, who also co-founded Vice magazine, warned that Twitter's actions against him were just part of a larger attempt to crack down on conservative voices and prevent President Trump from getting reelected.

Conservative Journalist Laura Loomer Banned from Facebook.  A conservative journalist and Big League Politics contributor was banned from Facebook on Sunday [8/12/2018] in the midst of a purge of prominent right-wing figures by Silicon Valley tech giants.  "Laura Loomer has been unpublished for repeatedly posting things that don't comply with Facebook Terms," the site informed Loomer.

Facebook Censors Benghazi Hero After He Is Interviewed By Infowars.  This is about a once free society that is becoming more Orwellian with each passing day.  Now that they have come for Alex Jones, they aren't going to stop.  It might not be tomorrow, but eventually, they are going to come for you.

Forget 1984, It's 2018.  In the last week, Antiwar.com editorial director Scott Horton, former State Department employee and author Peter Van Buren, and Dan McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, had their Twitter accounts suspended.  The hammer came down on them just one day after Alex Jones and InfoWars were banned and had all of their content removed from Facebook, YouTube, Apple's iTunes, and Spotify.

Report: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Personally Made Decision to Ban Alex Jones.  When an ordinary account gets banned on Facebook, it's possible that no human was ever involved in the decision.  Not so for Alex Jones and Infowars.  According to the New York Times, the order to ban the radio host came from the very top.

Now YouTube Is Adding 'Fact Checks' to Videos that Question 'Climate Change'.  YouTube is now adding "fact checks" to videos which question the man-made global warming scare narrative. [...] Sure, in many ways it's a trivial and pathetic gesture.  Quoting Wikipedia as your credible source is a bit like citing CNN as the go-to site for all the latest info on Donald Trump.  And anyway, that "scientifically accurate explainer" is at best vague, at worst far more misleading than the videos it is supposed to be "fact checking."

The Deep State is Censoring Voices That Do Not Agree With Them.  Alex Jones is the latest victim of the Deep State silencing voices that speak out against it.  The Alex Jones and Infowars Facebook, Youtube, Apple, and Spotify content has been removed for violating hate speech, bulling, and violence policies while pages on the left that violate the same policies remain and thrive.  [Video clip]

Don't let Big Tech become Big Brother.  I have never read anything by Alex Jones or InfoWars, nor have any desire to read any of his conspiracy theories.  However, I do care if 2.4 million of his followers on YouTube want to see his material and are now unable find it.  It is their basic right as Americans to have unimpeded access to the material of their choice.  But what some tech companies are doing today takes them away from operating as open platforms to becoming big media companies even though they are, by and large, legally immune from responsibility for user content.  They cannot claim both the exemption under the guise of being just a neutral utility then turn around and use editors and algorithms to pick opinion losers and winners.

Social media and the hate-speech slippery slope.  If Facebook has truly become the world's public-information highway, then efforts to censor it by either the tech giants or the government should be something thinking people should worry about it, even when the intended objects of such bans are exactly the people we wish to expose as liars and hatemongers.

Jared Holt the Fascist Who Got Alex Jones Banned from Internet Works for Soros Funded Website.  Jared Holt works for the George Soros funded website Right Wing Watch.  Right Wing Watch says on its "About Page" the Soros funded group is a project of People For the American Way (PFAW) dedicated to monitoring and exposing the activities and rhetoric of right-wing activists and organizations in order to expose their extreme agenda.

Midterm Meddling:  Facebook Blocks Republican Candidate's Ad.  Facebook has banned Republican congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng's campaign video ad about communist crimes that led her family to flee Cambodia for the U.S., claiming the platform doesn't allow "shocking, disrespectful, or sensational" content.  Elizabeth Heng, who is running for California's 16th congressional district seat, made the video about her parent's escape from mass-murder by the Khmer Rouge communists in the 1970s.

Jeong And Owens Prove Twitter Censorship Weighs More Heavily On Conservatives.  When The New York Times named Sarah Jeong to its editorial board despite a history of racist statements on Twitter (a history vaster than originally reported), non-leftists observed that similar comments directed against any group other than whites would be unacceptable in polite society.  Turning Points USA communications director Candace Owens decided to prove the point, and Twitter obliged her.  Owens tweeted comments Saturday worded identically to those made by Jeong, but she substituted "Jewish people" and "Black people" for white people, and she expressly noted that the comments mimicked Jeong.  Twitter promptly suspended her account, then restored it after an online backlash and an internal review.

Alex Jones's InfoWars Has Been De-Platformed and This Is Just the Beginning.  [Scroll down]  None of the companies involved in this action are considered "publishers."  While publishers bear some legal culpability for what they print, YouTube, etc., have a legal safe harbor in that they are considered communications platforms and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms from being sued for what appears on that platform.  This is not a bad law.  You shouldn't be able to sue a bullhorn company because Al Sharpton used one to generate an anti-Semitic riot.  What it does mean is that the decision to pull Jones, while leaving Louis Farrakhan untouched indicates this is less about "community standards" than it is about politics.

Instagram Bans Tommy Robinson As Conservative Purge Continues.  Anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson was imprisoned in May for filming outside of a Muslim grooming trial in Great Britain.  Tommy Robinson was freed on bail last week after appealing his imprisonment for contempt of court.  A 13 month sentence was imposed on the same day as Robinson's arrest in May for filming outside a grooming gang trial in Leeds.  On Wednesday [8/1/2018] it was struck down by Lord Chief Justice Burnett and two other judges.

More about Tommy Robinson.

Facebook: Farrakhan's Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories Don't Violate 'Hate Speech' Rules.  Videos posted to [Nation of Islam leader Louis] Farrakhan's Facebook page show the Nation of Islam leader claiming that Jews are secretly controlling government agencies to suppress black Americans and blaming Jews for "weaponizing" marijuana with "chemicals" to "feminize" black men.  Neither of those videos violate Facebook's rules prohibiting hate speech, a Facebook spokeswoman told The Daily Caller News Foundation in a phone interview Tuesday [8/7/2018].  Another video that showed Farrakhan warning against interracial marriage — which he blames on "the enemy" in Hollywood — to keep the black race "from being any further mongrelized," was originally ruled not to violate hate speech rules, according to the Facebook spokeswoman.

Facebook goes off the deep end again, bans GOP candidate Elizabeth Heng's Cambodian genocide images.  Communists have always sought to cover up the crimes of communism.  It started in Ukraine in the 1930s, when New York Times commie-symp reporter Walter Duranty covered up the man-made mass starvation in that part of the Soviet Union, and it's continued today in Venezuela with dictator Nicolás Maduro forbidding photos of empty store shelves and refusing to permit aid to the country's starving people, for fear of the truth getting out.  National Socialists are at least as zealous in seeking to cover up the truth about their Holocaust against the Jews.  So I stare, appalled, as Facebook has been caught censoring the images of the Cambodian holocaust presented by GOP congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng of the Central Valley in a video that can be seen here.  [Video clip]

Alex Jones shutdown ignites debate over social media content policing, censorship.  Facebook and YouTube shut down accounts Monday run by radio host Alex Jones, saying his charged rhetoric violated their policies and were detracting from their efforts to spawn a civil conversation.  Apple also said it nixed Mr. Jones' podcast from its iTunes subscription lists, and Spotify erased the host's program from its feed, as social media companies began to take a more active role in policing their content.  The decision ignited a debate in technology circles, with even some of Mr. Jones' critics wondering whether social media companies are capable of, or should be, policing content to this extent.

Conservative Speech Be Banned!  Over on Twitter, Paul Joseph Watson, one of the leading contributors to Infowars, raised his voice in protest and warning:  "Facebook has permanently BANNED Infowars.  For unspecified 'hate speech'.  They didn't even tell us what the offending posts were.  This sets a chilling precedent for free speech.  To all other conservative news outlets — you are next.  The great censorship purge has truly begun."  He added, "Whatever you think of Infowars, they're coming for you next."  Now, I've mentioned before that, by and large, I am not a fan of Infowars (although Watson's takedowns of the radical left are often bitingly on target).  At the same time, I've stated that YouTube's conflict with Infowars (the precursor to the current attack) should concern us all.

A bit of clarity on the Alex Jones situation.  The number of problems with the entire "Facebook should be handled like a public utility" concept and the many ways the analogy falls apart are too numerous to go into here yet again.  But with that said, I'll agree with Jonah's point that the electric company doesn't come over and cut off your power because you peddle theories about 9/11 or tell people that Jews control the weather.

Twitter CEO on decision not to ban Alex Jones: 'He hasn't violated our rules'.  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Tuesday [8/7/2018] explained the site's decision not to suspend conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, breaking with several other top tech companies.  In recent days, Jones and his website, InfoWars, have been banned or otherwise punished by YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Facebook and others.  In a series of tweets, Dorsey said that Jones had not violated Twitter rules.

Democrats attempt to stifle dissent:
'Survival of our democracy' depends on banning sites like InfoWars, Dem senator says.  Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is calling on other tech companies to ban more sites like InfoWars, and says the survival of American democracy depends on it.  "Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart.  These companies must do more than take down one website.  The survival of our democracy depends on it," Murphy tweeted Monday [8/6/2018].

Legislators swore....  ... to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, not to defend their parties against all inconvenient dissent.

Are Tech Giants Working Together To Censor Conservatives?  Liberal Tech Giants Facebook, Twitter, Google-YouTube and Wikipedia have all stepped up their harassment of conservative publishers since the 2016 election.  The far left and Democrats understand that conservatives get their news from online publishers.  Since the election The Gateway Pundit found from traffic analysis that Facebook has eliminated 93% of traffic to top conservative websites.

Twitter is run by Democratic donors and activists.  After Twitter was caught last month "shadow-banning" Republicans, while giving Democrats unrestricted voice, the social-media giant insisted it has no political agenda.  But records of its political contributions show board members, top executives and major shareholders have all given overwhelmingly to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while snubbing Republicans and Donald Trump.  Federal records reveal 80 percent of Twitter's corporate PAC contributions in the 2018 election cycle have gone to Democratic candidates, none of whom are moderates.  Liberal Democrats also got top dollar in the 2016 race.  The lobbying records I reviewed, moreover, show Twitter has sought to influence Congress and federal agencies on behalf of Democratic causes and against President Trump's policies.

Facebook and Apple remove pages and podcasts from Alex Jones for hate speech violations.  Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest clamped down on content by Alex Jones Monday [8/6/2018].  Apple confirmed on Monday that it had removed five out of six podcasts, which includes Jones' infamous "The Alex Jones Show" as well as a number of other InfoWars audio streams.  The news was originally reported by BuzzFeed News.  Facebook and Google made similar decisions later on Monday.

Twitter's Statement About How They Don't Shadow Ban Kinda Sounds Like They Shadow Ban.  While others are distracted by recent news that the U.S. economy grew by 4.1% this quarter, or that Donald Trump's once-loyal lawyer now claims, without evidence, that the then-presidential candidate was aware his son was meeting with Russians for dirt on Hillary Clinton (which Trump continues to deny), or that Russian hackers appear to have targeted the first candidate in the 2018 cycle, it's easy to miss the most important question of the day:  Is Twitter being unfair to conservatives?  VICE News first noticed that several prominent Republicans. such as RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and congressmen like Matt Gaetz and Mark Meadows, were not appearing in Twitter's search box even when their full names were typed out.  That effectively lumped in Republican politicians with figures like far-right provocateurs Richard Spencer, Laura Loomer, and Mike Cernovich.  By contrast, none of their Democratic counterparts were affected.  After the story went up, several conservative journalists noticed their accounts were also affected.

Candace Owens Copies Racist Tweets by Sarah Jeong but Replaces "White" with "Black" and Is Immediately Suspended!.  On Saturday [8/4/2018] conservative Candace Owens copied the racist tweets by Sarah Jeong but replaced "white" with "black" and "Jewish."  She was immediately suspended!  This is the far left insanity and racism being pushed by Twitter!

Candace Owens was Suspended from Twitter — We've Got Her Top 10 Tweets of the Week — Guess Which One Got Their Attention?  Candace Owens started out her tweet by claiming she vehemently disagreed with President Trump's remark about Don Lemon being the dumbest man of television, demanding that MSNBC's Joe Scarborough of the "Morning Joe" show is the dumbest man on television.

Facebook Caves to Leftist Media Mob, Permanently Bans InfoWars.  In the latest Orwellian nightmare to come from Silicon Valley, Facebook has caved to the leftist media mob demanding censorship of InfoWars and permanently banned their page.

Jim Jordan:  Social Media Giants 'Cannot Say They're an Open Platform' and Restrict Free Speech.  House Freedom Caucus co-founder Jim Jordan (R-OH) told Breitbart News Daily in an exclusive interview on Friday that social media giants "cannot say they're an open platform" and then restrict free speech.  Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow asked Jordan about the rampant censorship on social media, particularly on Twitter.  Breitbart News reported that Twitter was engaging in shadow banning, a method by which Twitter can limit the reach of a Twitter account, including stopping a user's followers from seeing tweets from their account.  This practice has reportedly disproportionately affected conservatives on the platform.

Twitter To Conservatives:  DROP DEAD!.  Just last week Twitter got caught shadow banning prominent Republicans including party chair Ronna McDaniel, according to an article published by Vice News.  Rather than showing contrition, Twitter has decided to double down publicly displaying their hatred of Republicans and conservatives.  In other words, they are telling them to Drop Dead!  Twitter has chosen a group mostly comprised of Trump haters to study "how communities form around political discussions on Twitter, and the challenges that may arise as those discussions develop. [...] As reported by Fox News, at least four of the six members of the new Twitter team has a history of being anti-Trump.

Facebook Blocks Beautiful and Moving Pro-Life Ad:  Says It Violates Rules.  Chris McDonough is a Republican candidate for St. Charles County Circuit Judge, Division 4 in Missouri.  On Sunday [7/29/2018] Chris posted this beautiful and hopeful story on his McDonough for Judge Facebook page. [...] But Facebook would not approve the pro-life ad.  It violated the rules.

Kenya believe it?
Thousands of Kenyans Leave Twitter for Gab After Popular Blogger Banned.  Thousands of Kenyan Twitter users have left the website for the free speech social media platform Gab following the suspension of a popular Kenyan blogger.  Following the suspension of influential blogger Cyprian Nyakundi, over 5,000 Kenyan Twitter users have left the platform, migrating to the free-speech social media platform Gab.

Consequences for "Shadow-Banning" Conservatives.  Last week, Vice News reported Twitter was allegedly "Shadow-Banning" prominent conservatives by making it harder to search for them on their platform.  Twitter offers an auto-populated drop-down search box which makes it easy to lookup user accounts, however certain conservatives accounts were not appearing in these search results.  Thus, the term "Shadow-Ban" became known as when a social media company bans a user account without the user ever knowing.  The Twitter account of Rep. Devin Nunes (R) was subject to this "Shadow-Ban" and he is now looking into possible legal action against the social media giant for the decrease in visibility of his account as well as many other conservatives that were banned[.]

Poor Facebook.  Facebook claims that it can bring more and more people together, and yet it chooses to exclude the voices of those it disagrees with via some "magic" algorithm.  All this in an effort to keep the "bad" actors from offending or angering many of us who disagree.  We all risk being offensive when we speak to others.  Frankly, many Americans are just plain tired of being told we are being offensive with every thought and phrase and thus are more inclined to speak out with reckless abandon.

Twitter Suspends Conservative Commentator Over Her Comments About Extreme Muslims, Transgender Troops.  Kathleen McKinley, a conservative blogger and political commentator for a local Fox station in Houston, was surprised Friday [7/27/2018] to find an email from Twitter announcing her account had been suspended.  Twitter listed two tweets that it claimed violated rules against "hateful conduct," emails that McKinley shared with The Daily Caller News Foundation show.

Twitter's Censorship Problem Looks Like It's Here To Stay.  The company faced a sharp backlash last week after a Vice News investigation revealed that Twitter was hiding several prominent Republicans from its search bar.  Those affected included four House Republicans:  Rep. Devin Nunes of California, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.  All four are members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.  Democrats weren't affected in the same way, Vice found.  Nunes is looking at taking legal steps against Twitter, he said in a Fox News interview on Sunday [7/29/2018].

Media Blackout on Conservative Voices now in Effect for Midterms.  The gig is up on mainstream and social media.  It's not about algorithms, not about Facebook's sanctimonious 'Community Standards'.  It's not even about both Facebook and Twitter suddenly nosediving at the same time on the stock market.  It's about the MSM and social media working in sync with the Democrats to regain power in Midterm elections by keeping the masses from ever getting anywhere close to the truth.  Celebrating the downward spiral of Facebook and Twitter is a perfect diversion to keep people from knowing they can no longer find the truth on the 'Net.  Even if social media giants are losing billions, they'll still be around for Midterms and more than likely straight through the 2020 presidential race.

Twitter Algorithm Buried Republicans For Something Totally Out Of Their Control.  Several Republican congressmen's Twitter accounts were suppressed this week because users that Twitter is actively trying to suppress engaged with the congressmen's handles, two top Twitter executives said in a Thursday evening blog post.  Twitter executives Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour conceded in a Thursday evening blog post that Twitter's algorithm had limited the Republican congressmen's visibility on the site because it linked them to what the company calls "bad-faith actors."  Twitter, in May, began phasing in a change to its algorithm to suppress Twitter users who the company said stop short of violating Twitter's terms of service, but are still considered harmful to "healthy conversation."  The new algorithm, Twitter said, would discriminate against those "bad-faith actors" by hiding their visibility in conversations and searches.

Twitter Admits:  Your Posts Will Be Hidden if the Right Accounts Block You.  Twitter manipulates the visibility of its users based on who has chosen to block or mute them, the company admitted in a Thursday [7/26/2018] blog post — raising further questions about ideological bias in how the tech giant chooses which accounts set the standard for "conversational health."  Twitter has denied the use of shadowbanning, arguing over semantics while admitting it does hide users' posts via algorithmic parameters that the company continues to defend with virtually zero transparency.

Devin Nunes:  We Are Looking at "Legal Remedies" to Deal with Twitter Censoring Conservatives.  A recent study by the leftist website VICE News found that Twitter is censoring top pro-Trump lawmakers.  Twitter is targeting pro-Trump Republican lawmakers Matt Gaetz, Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe with the same shadowbanning technique.  Twitter is also censoring prominent pro-Trump accounts including:  Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Paul Joseph Watson, TGP's Jim Hoft, TGP's Cassandra Fairbanks, TGP's Lucian Wintrich, TGP's Cristina Laila and Laura Loomer among others.

Shadowbanning: Twitter's Revenge on Trump.  Twitter, like its Facebook cousin, now claims to have "fixed" the "error" involving the failure of prominent conservatives such as Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to not appear in Twitter's search box and denies it engages in the practice known as "shadow banning." [...] Yes, Virginia, shadowbanning exists as Twitter plays "trick or tweet" with conservatives.  As a shadowbanned Twitter user, I have seen my tweets suddenly become "unavailable," followers suddenly "unfollow" en masse, Twitter analytics stats suddenly flatline and set to zero, and attached photos or explanatory graphics suddenly become "unavailable".  If you are a prolific Twitter conservative, you will be accused of "automated" behavior and have your account locked or even suspended.  Once I was suspended for "aggressive following behavior" just for following all conservative accounts Twitter suggested I should follow.

Rep. Matt Gaetz Filing Federal Election Commission Complaint Against Twitter.  Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is filing a complaint against Twitter with the Federal Election Commission after it was revealed that his own account was being shadowbanned by Twitter.  Rep. Gaetz argued earlier this week that he believes that Twitter may have illegally donated to the campaigns of his opponents by prejudicing against his content and limiting his social media visibility.  An investigation from the far-left Vice Magazine found that only conservatives users were being subjected to the Twitter search limiting that impacted Gaetz.

Twitter Bans Prominent Pro-Trump Activists as It Fights Censorship Allegations.  Twitter banned the account of a pro-Trump grassroots campaign with 15 state field directors along with another prominent Trump supporter, failing to reinstate the accounts on the same day that the company came under fire from the president himself for discrimination against conservatives.

On Social Media, Freedom of Speech Is Under Attack.  The fact that Facebook and Twitter are the platforms on which political discussion largely takes place, and probably will remain such for the foreseeable future, given the network effects that entrench them, is deeply troubling.  Both companies are run by liberals, and free speech is under attack on both platforms.

Facebook executives defend having Fox News, 'atrocious' Infowars on platform.  Facebook executives promoting their video-on-demand service got into a combative exchange with reporters while at the Television Critics Association's press tour in Beverly Hills on Wednesday.  The issue: the presence of right-wing conspiracy site Infowars and Fox News on the social network's platform.  The kerfuffle started when Fidji Simo, Facebook's vice president of video, was asked about Infowars stories on their platform while touting new Facebook Watch entertainment shows.

Facebook's Censorship in Germany.  Marlene Weise was banned from Facebook for 30 days, for posting a set of two pictures:  One showed the Iranian women's national volleyball team from the 1970s, wearing t-shirts and shorts; the other, the current Iranian team, wearing hijabs and clothes that cover arms and legs.

Tom Fitton:  Twitter Shadow-Banned My Account After President Trump Tweeted About Me.  Twitter is desperately trying to do damage control after they were caught red-handed shadow-banning Trump supporters and Republican lawmakers.  President of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton said this week he was shadow-banned by Twitter after President Trump tweeted about him.  He said the shadow-ban appears to be lifted after publicly complaining about it.

Twitter [is] 'Shadow Banning' Prominent Republicans.  Algorithms employed by Twitter to limit the reach of hateful content are preventing the accounts of prominent Republicans, such as RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, from appearing in search results.  The phenomenon known as "shadow banning" has affected several conservative Republican lawmakers, including Representatives Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz, as well as Donald Trump Jr.'s spokesman Andrew Surabian.  It has not extended to their counterparts on the left, whose accounts continue to auto-populate in Twitter search results.  When contacted for comment, a Twitter spokesman told Vice that the shadow bans were the result of algorithms that analyze "account behavior" in order to reduce the visibility of accounts that routinely spew hateful and bigoted content.  The stated goal of the shadow-banning algorithms, according to a May 15 blog post, is to elevate the visibility of accounts that are "contributing to the healthy conversation" in searches and conversation.

How 'Social Media' Became 'Anti-Social Media': Twitter's And Facebook's Reckoning.  Twitter might soon have the government breathing down its neck for "shadow-banning" conservatives, while Facebook's market value has plunged more than $130 billion in just two days as the once-dominant social media site's growth goes flat amid charges of bias.  Is this the beginning of the end of the social media boom?

How Facebook Went So Wrong So Fast.  What happened?  That's what many of Facebook Inc.'s investors — and I — have spent the last 18 hours wondering.  On Wednesday, the company posted disappointing figures for second-quarter revenue, user growth and profits.  Executives also warned that Facebook's rapid rate of revenue growth would become relatively pedestrian the rest of this year and that a surge of spending would drastically drag down profit margins for the next several years.  During a conference call with stock analysts, nearly every word out of executives' mouths was more alarming than the last.

Trump warns Twitter it will be investigated for 'shadow banning' conservatives.  Donald Trump entered a contentious battle over online censorship on Thursday, blasting privately-owned Twitter for allegedly depressing the exposure of messages from its conservaitve users.  'Twitter "SHADOW BANNING" prominent Republicans.  Not good' the president boomed, ironically on his globally unmissable Twitter account.  'We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once!  Many complaints.'  It's unclear what the administration could do to challenge Twitter for sorting content and delivering it selectively to users based on a computer algorithm.

Twitter Suspends Jim Treacher.  In another suspension for Tweeting While Conservative, Twitter has suspended Jim Treacher's account.

Facebook's philistines back at it, now censoring art of Flemish masters.  Are the leftists running Facebook really that stupid?  According to the Flanders tourist authority, they're censoring images from Rubens paintings, unable to distinguish art from pornography.  Someone told them "nude, bad," and not a one of them had sufficient art education to know that these painting represent the pinnacle of Western cultural achievement.

Exploring the Depths of Democrat Depravity.  Facebook bans "hate speech" with their algorithms which usually turns out to be conservative opinions.  Google manages to arrive at something from a Conservative website around the 15th or 20th posting.  Twitter celebrates vicious anti-Trump inanities from celebrities who guarantee more followers, and bans anyone with a conservative opinion.  There are two large organizations working to get the public to refuse to patronize any business that does not fall in the Leftist Line.  One is "Sleeping Giant" exposed as the work of one Matt Rivitz, a San Francisco advertising person who utilizes social media mobs to silence conservative voices.  There is also "Grab Your Wallet" which reaches out to get people to boycott all companies who do not fall into the clear Lefty Line.  Any store selling Trump products.  Anyone who raised funds for Trump, Anyone religious like Chick-Fil-A, anyone connected in any way with the gun industry, any Trump hotels, branded or operated business.  Anyone whose CEO donated to Trump.

Sparks fly at hearing on anti-conservative bias in tech.  [Scroll down]  The lawmakers cited high-profile examples of conservative posts being censored, including one incident when a video for Rep. Marsha Blackburn's (R-Tenn.) Senate bid accusing Planned Parenthood of selling "baby body parts" was taken down as a campaign ad on Twitter.  Blackburn didn't speak during the hearing, but she told The Hill before that the "subjective manipulation of algorithms is of tremendous concern for us."  "We've addressed it and we plan on keeping the pressure on big tech," she added.  Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) questioned technology companies' legal responsibilities.  Issa pressed Google on an incident where search results claimed Nazism was an ideology of the California Republican Party.  The mistake happened because of an incorrect entry on a Wikipedia page that Google used to auto-populate search information boxes.  "When you absorb content, aren't you absorbing the responsibility?" Issa asked.  He asked if major tech companies should now be held to the same standards as media outlets.

How Facebook Is Fact-Checking Conservative Sites into Oblivion.  Facebook announced last year that they will be using third-party fact-checkers to root out "fake news" on their platform.  At the time of the announcement, conservatives sounded the alarm about how some of the fact-checkers they're using are left-wing hacks like PolitiFact and Snopes (who recently, with straight faces, fact-checked a piece of satire from The Babylon Bee).

The Government is Your Mother, and Mother Knows Best.  Some of my readers may already know that I've been banned from Twitter.  You may not know the reason, however.  Some folks were arguing that the word "retarded" should be banned from Twitter discourse.  Naturally, I replied that this was retarded.  Twitter has apparently sided with those demanding censorship, so let it be known that the social media platform has banned use of this word.  Using it results in account suspension.

Country band claims Facebook denied ad request for patriotic song.  A country group is speaking out against Facebook, after the social media platform did not permit the band to promote its song "I Stand for the Flag" on the social media site, a new report says.  The Wes Cook Band released a video for the song on Tuesday and submitted a request using Facebook's paid promotion tools to promote the content.  Although it was initially approved, Facebook then declined the request due to the video's "political content," Fox News reports.

UK Police Shut Down Popular Gun Channel on YouTube, Branding it a 'Forum of Extremism'.  On Sunday [6/10/2018], YouTuber Callum Long-Collins announced he would be effectively shutting down the channel EnglishShooting, a YouTube channel that racked up more than 15,000 subscribers and more than 12 million views in the past four years.  Long-Collins said the police had marked his YouTube channel as a "forum of extremism," and that he had to "show the police that I am a fit character to own firearms within the U.K."  "I was told that due to repeated comments from other people on the videos [police] felt that the channel was a forum of extremism and it was promoting views that were not in line with legal firearms ownership within the U.K.," Long-Collins said in a YouTube video announcing "The End of EnglishShooting."

Is Twitter censoring the #WalkAway hashtag?  Using the #WalkAway hashtag, former democrats are tweeting about their decision to leave their party.  Brandon Straka of Unsilent Minority started the movement with a powerful video that is blowing up Twitter (see below).  Yet since it began, #WalkAway (and a similar hashtag, #DemExit) have not trended, despite their immense popularity.  People on Twitter are calling out the social media giant for censoring the hashtag.

Facebook permanently bans young anti-migration "Identitarian" movement.  Over the last few years, Westerners have been conditioned to accept madness.  Calling out human rights abuses and trying to save Western countries from becoming mirror images of Islamic states is not "extremist," and does not constitute "hate."  The young "identitarian" movement has been expanding to defend against Islamization.

The Time I Got Punished for Hate Speech.  It's been quite a week for me already, because I was thrown in jail and released 24 hours later.  I had no counsel, no Miranda rights, and no chance for an early release.  However, this wasn't a literal jail.  It reaches farther into society than the place people go when they break our criminal laws.  This was Facebook jail.  I've used Facebook since 2009, and despite my sometimes heated political rhetoric and, admittedly, outright troll-baiting, this was the first time I was censored and banned.  The alleged offense?  Hate speech.  Yes, that vague and often indefinable term that nevertheless causes liberals to gasp and swoon.

California Judge:  Twitter Can Be Sued For Falsely Advertising They Allow Free Speech.  A California judge has ruled that social media giant Twitter can be sued for falsely advertising free speech.  The judge said that Twitter's policy of banning users "at any time, for any reason or for no reason" may constitute an "unconscionable contract" for a company which advertises free speech.  The judge rejected Twitter's motion to dismiss the lawsuit from Jared Taylor, who was banned by the platform in December last year, according to Breitbart.  Taylor, a self-described "white activist" may proceed with his lawsuit against Twitter because the social media company falsely advertises free speech, yet bans users for "any or no reason."

They're calling you stupid.  Every time you hear some young hip woke leftist at a technology company like Facebook telling you he needs to protect you from fake news, remember that what he's saying is that you're a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal who is too stupid to figure out that it's okay for good people like Hillary to break the law.  In fact, he's saying the majority of Americans are too intellectually challenged to discriminate between fact and fiction.  Historically, "common" folk were able to figure out that the National Enquirer's stories about two-headed alien Elvis clones are fake and even that professional wrestling is staged.  They were able to see through the lies of Nazis and communists.  Yet for some reason, we're now being told that we need our betters to protects us from what they think we shouldn't read because we're just too stupid to differentiate between what's true and what's not.

Judge Rules In Favor Of Right-Winger Suing Twitter For Banning His Account.  On Thursday [6/14/2018], a California superior court judge ruled in favor of "white advocate" Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, who is suing Twitter for banning his account over his political views.

Twitter to Face Claims by 'White Advocate' Over Banned Accounts.  Twitter Inc. lost its bid to dismiss a lawsuit by a "white advocate" who was banned from the site in a challenge to the company's ability to exclude users it deems objectionable.  California Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn in San Francisco rejected Jared Taylor's claims that Twitter violated his free speech rights and discriminated against him when it permanently suspended his accounts in December.

The Editor says...
Censorship is bad, but Twitter is not a public utility.  One has the right to free speech, but one does not have the right to use someone else's communications medium.

Facebook Exec Details 'Path Toward More Quality News' Without 'Becoming a News Organization'.  Campbell Brown, head of global news partnerships at Facebook, said the original news content that Facebook is starting to roll out does not mean the company is becoming a news organization.  "We're not becoming a news organization but we have a lot of news on the platform and we are a huge part of the news ecosystem, and it means we have a responsibility to the news ecosystem and we are responsible for the news that is on our platform.  So with that in mind, we have a lot of work we are going to have to do over the course of this year that is really foundational work around defining what is and isn't a news organization — it's akin to what Google has done with Google News," Brown said during a discussion organized by Axios about the future of media on Monday evening [6/11/2018].

Will YouTube Block the Bible?  I know the very question sounds outlandish, but in light of recent developments, it's only fair to ask:  Will YouTube block the Bible?  If you've followed the LGBT outcry surrounding our recent video on the Bible and homosexuality, you're aware that YouTube came under tremendous criticism for running ads for our video (along with one from the ADF) on some LGBT YouTube channels.  As a result of the outcry, which was totally disproportionate to YouTube's offense, the internet giant responded with a strong statement on June 7, directed to "our LGBTQ community."  YouTube noted that, "Over the past few days, we've heard many questions around monetization and how ads are served against videos by LGBTQ creators.  We know this has been both confusing and painful, and want you to know that we hear you."

Facebook, Amazon, Google And Twitter All Work With Left-Wing SPLC.  Four of the world's biggest tech platforms have working partnerships with a left-wing nonprofit that has a track record of inaccuracies and routinely labels conservative organizations as "hate groups."  Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter all work with or consult the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in policing their platforms for "hate speech" or "hate groups," a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.  The SPLC is on a list of "external experts and organizations" that Facebook works with "to inform our hate speech policies," Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja told TheDCNF in an interview.

Facebook to Replace 'Trending News' with 'Breaking News', Limited to 80 Undisclosed Publications.  Facebook has announced the end of their controversial "trending news" feature.  It is to be replaced by a "breaking news" label that it is testing with a select group of 80 publications.  Facebook has not yet said if the feature will become available to all publications.  Facebook said they will replace trending news — the list of "trending stories" that appear in users' sidebars — with three new features, one focused on breaking news, another on local news, and another on video.

Facebook 'doctoring' news, says Brexit leader.  Adding to Facebook's woes after it breached its users' trust by giving out their private information, a key Brexit leader is now calling the social media giant out for "doctoring" its news to align with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's leftist "personal political views."  British politician Nigel Farage — a major orchestrator of the British Brexit movement — publicly accused Zuckerberg of manipulating news to conform to his political worldview as European parliament interrogated the social media guru about privacy issues, bias witnessed on the Web and various other topics of concern.

Twitter Has A New Way To [Torment] Conservatives.  Twitter seems to have found a new way to throttle certain users' accounts, as one prominent conservative writer and comedian recently found himself in the crosshairs of this insidious tactic.  Stephen Kruiser, a longtime stand-up comic and contributor at conservative outlets including PJ Media and American Spectator, was an early adopter of Twitter and has spent nearly a decade building up an impressive following of over 200,000 people.  For those of us who work in the media and entertainment industries, Twitter is not just a frivolous distraction and a way to follow news trends; it's an invaluable promotional tool.

Mark Zuckerberg Envisions a Facebook 'Supreme Court'.  At the Viva Technology conference in Paris, France, Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the audience that he envisions a "Supreme Court" that would evaluate appeals from users who have had their posts removed from the social media platform.  Asked about some of his goals for the future, Zuckerberg said that he wants to spend time focusing on governance of the two billion people in the Facebook community.

Amazon demonitizes conservative website (us).  For as long as I can remember, Legal Insurrection has participated in Amazon Associates, a way for websites to earn fees when readers shop at Amazon.com via links from our website.  It was an important source of revenue to us, and paid for some of the operating expenses readers never see.  On Saturday morning, April 28, 2018, I woke up to an email in my inbox from Amazon Associates telling me our participation in the program was terminated, our account closed, that the decision was final and there was no appeal.  On top of that, Amazon was holding back any accumulated money it owed us.  There was no prior indication of a problem, or chance to cure.

Spotify Announces Partnership with Far-Left Groups Including SPLC to Police Platform.  Music streaming service Spotify has announced a partnership with several far-left groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), in an attempt to police the platform and remove "hate content."  The groups include the SPLC, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Color of Change, GLAAD, Showing Up For Racial Justice, Muslim Advocates, and the International Network Against Cyber Hate.

Twitter Is Going To Limit The Visibility Of Tweets From People Behaving Badly.  On Tuesday, Twitter announced a massive change to the way its conversations will work, evaluating not just the content of individual tweets, but the way users behave more broadly on the service.  Twitter will now use thousands of behavioral signals when filtering search, replies, and algorithmic recommendations.  If it believes you are trying to game its system, or simply acting like a jerk, it will push your tweets lower down.  It's the biggest update so far in the company's push to create healthier conversations, an initiative announced by its CEO Jack Dorsey in March.  Among the signals Twitter will use:  whether you tweet at large numbers of accounts you don't follow, how often you're blocked by people you interact with, whether you created many accounts from a single IP address, and whether your account is closely related to others that have violated its terms of service.

Are Google and YouTube Blocking Searches for Red Pill Videos?  A year or so ago, there were a spate of articles about the red pill videos on YouTube — millennials turning off to the bullying by feminists and race hustlers, thinking for themselves, becoming conservative, and posting a video of their personal journey from blue to red online.  I googled 'red pill' and had a cheerful time following links.  I learned about Candace Owens at that time, and a lot of other black and white millennials who had posted articulate, heartfelt, intimate, sometimes funny YouTubes explaining why they'd become conservative.  For months afterward, when I was sick of all the bad news about millennials becoming little fascists, I would turn to the red pill videos and cheer myself up.  And then I found I could no longer find them.  When I went to YouTube and searched for red pill, all I got was the documentary by that name (worth seeing) available for $3.99.  The most famous videos are still there.  But even they are hard to find.

Are Facebook And Google Trying To Shut Down Pro-Life Voices In Ireland?  While Facebook remains under fire in the US for its role in amplifying "fake news," critics across the sea allege that the social-media platform has joined forces with Google to shut down news in Ireland.  Both platforms have refused to accept any advertising related to the May 25th referendum to repeal the country's Eighth Amendment, which would legalize abortion in Ireland.  The move has some wondering whether this reveals a threat to free speech and public debate.

Platform, or Publisher?  The dominant social media companies must choose:  if they are neutral platforms, they should have immunity from litigation.  If they are publishers making editorial choices, then they should relinquish this valuable exemption.

Google Bans Pro-Life Ads Ahead of Ireland Vote to Legalize Abortion.  As the vote on abortion quickly approaches in Ireland, another online media giant has decided to ban all ads related to the referendum.  Google no longer will run ads related to the Irish abortion vote on its search site or YouTube, according to the Irish Independent.  Google said the policies will apply to ads from both sides of the abortion debate; but when LifeNews searched Google for ads just prior to its new policy taking effect, it found only one ad — a pro-life ad — when it searched "Ireland abortion referendum" and "Ireland 8th amendment"  The ad is for the Love Both campaign, a coalition of Irish pro-life groups working to defend unborn babies' rights in the country.

How Misinformation Spreads on Social Media — And What To Do About It.  "We take misinformation seriously," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote just weeks after the 2016 election.  In the year since, the question of how to counteract the damage done by "fake news" has become a pressing issue both for technology companies and governments across the globe.  Yet as widespread as the problem is, opportunities to glimpse misinformation in action are fairly rare.  Most users who generate misinformation do not share accurate information too, so it can be difficult to tease out the effect of misinformation itself.  For example, when President Trump shares misinformation on Twitter, his tweets tend to go viral.  But they may not be going viral because of the misinformation:  All those retweets may instead owe to the popularity of Trump's account, or the fact that he writes about politically charged subjects.

Does This Article Contain Hate Speech?  Last Wednesday morning [5/2/2018] for about twenty minutes, Facebook users in the USA saw a new custom button at the bottom of each post that asked the following question:  ["]Does this post contain hate speech?["]  This message appeared under every Facebook post, so if it was a picture of your grandchild, you'd be asked whether it contained hate speech.  If it was a stock photo of a cat sitting on a windowsill and squinting serenely, you would be asked if that, too, constituted hate speech.  Users could select "yes" or "no," whereupon they'd be directed to further options such as "Test P1" and "Test P2" — and if those options don't make any sense, that's because Facebook's Hate Squad was still testing a script and it accidentally went live.

Prominent Christian Legal Group Barred From Amazon Program While Openly Anti-Semitic Groups Remain.  Amazon has barred prominent Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) from participating in its Amazon Smile charitable program, which allows nonprofits to recoup a small fraction of the money their supporters spend through Amazon.  ADF, which specializes in First Amendment law and has won cases at the Supreme Court, is barred from Amazon Smile on account of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, which labeled ADF a "hate group."

Twitter Bans Criticism of Islam.  Hamas has a Twitter account and its top tweet calls for, "intensifying efforts to resist Israeli Judaisation of Jerusalem."  (The Hamas site is protected by Cloudflare.)  Twitter doesn't have a problem with a murderous Islamic terror group slurring Jews on its service.  Here, as Front Page's Jamie Glazov found out, is what it does have a problem with. [...]

Zuckerberg's Announcement Means Final Remaining Conservative Voices on Facebook Will Be Eliminated by Election Day.  Since the 2016 election Facebook has been cracking down on conservative and pro-Trump content.  Top conservative websites have seen a stunning drop in their Facebook traffic.  This was no accident.  This was the plan.  In January 2017, Facebook began making algorithm changes to make sure conservative news was no longer so influential.

Facebook Plans To 'Dial Up' Suppression Of Certain News Outlets.  Facebook plans to "dial up" the suppression of certain news outlets, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed on Tuesday.  Zuckerberg made the comment while holding an off-the-record meeting with a select group of media outlets.  Zuckerberg briefly went on the record at the end of the meeting to answer questions about Facebook's recent changes to the newsfeed, according to BuzzFeed, which first reported his comments.  "We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we're going to dial up the intensity of that over time," Zuckerberg said.  "We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground."

Facebook Asks on Every Post: 'Is This Hate Speech?'.  On Tuesday [5/1/2018], Facebook launched an initiative enabling users to identify "hate speech."  On virtually every single public post, an option has emerged.  "Does this post contain hate speech?" the site asks, giving two options:  "Yes" or "No."  Each post also gives the option to dismiss the question with a tiny "x" box to the right of the answers.  The "hate speech" question even appears on a user's own posts.

Diamond and Silk Destroy Democrat for Defending Facebook Censorship.  Democrat Hank Johnson (D-GA), famous for asking if too many marines would make the Island of Guam tip over, had an opportunity to talk to Facebook personalities Diamond and Silk on Thursday, during a hearing on web censorship.  Instead of taking the opportunity seriously and trying to understand what it's like to be censored by the tech giants (Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc), Johnson instead chose to go on the attack and pester the two women about making money with their videos.  (As if this is somehow wrong, or even controversial?)  [Video clip]

Over at YouTube, cartel hit men, si — conservatives, no.  [Scroll down]  So, according to YouTube, a thug accused of a crime almost too ghastly to contemplate, on behalf of a Mexican drug cartel — an organization that nearly matches ISIS and Hamas for sheer foulness — meets the standards of the net's premier video-sharing site.  It's a good thing QBA didn't do something truly unforgiveable, like criticize illegal aliens, characterize Muslims as terrorists, or recommend that Planned Parenthood be defunded.

Facebook Blocks Daily Caller Story On FBI Texts — Blames 'Spam' Algorithm.  Facebook blocked users Friday from sharing a Daily Caller story on the 300 "missing" text messages between FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page that were turned over to Congress on Thursday night [4/26/2018].  The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained and published the text messages early Friday morning.  Sometime Friday afternoon, however, Facebook began blocking users from sharing the story with their friends, warning them that the story could be spam.

Amazon Accused of Slashing Over 900 Negative Reviews of Hillary's Book.  Amazon is batting down claims that it deleted hundreds of one-star reviews of Hillary Clinton's new book about the 2016 campaign, "What Happened," and says that it doesn't delete reviews because they are negative.  "We never suppress reviews based on star rating or sentiment," Amazon told LifeZette in an emailed statement.  "We have triggers in place to detect when numerous reviews post in a short amount of time that are unrelated to the product.  When these triggers are activated, we suppress all non-Amazon Verified Purchase (AVP) reviews on the product."

After Muslim Attacks Frontpage Editor, Threatens Violence, Facebook Bans Editor.  Facebook is on the defensive.  Mark Zuckerberg is dealing with bad publicity on all sides:  the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the grilling in front of Congress and Senate, the ongoing scandal about his property in Hawaii, and the fact that China continues to show a lack of interest in allowing him to offer Facebook to their nation.  Because of this, Facebook seems to be bending over backward to earn good PR with certain groups.  However, that apparently doesn't extend to right-leaning groups.  A right-leaning individual found that when he was threatened by a Muslim with physical harm, Facebook not only didn't penalize the Muslim, but instead banned the FrontPage Editor from access and use of his account for seven days.

Video/Audio of Silencerco Maxim 9 on new Video platform GunStreamer.com.  [Here] is a link to a video/audio of the Silencerco Maxim 9 from the industry day at the range at the Shot Show in 2017.  The video is on a new platform GunStreamer.com, to compete with Youtube.  Youtube is actively demonitzing and marginalizing gun videos and gun writers.  This amounts to private censorship.  It has become particularly bad since Youtube was acquired by Google.  Google motto "Don't be Evil" seems particularly ironic.  The insurrection is going to have to find ways to get the message out against the forces of the empire/establishment.  Google is clearly one of the prime movers in the Establishment/empire.

Why Zuckerberg's testimony doesn't add up.  Mark Zuckerberg proudly trotted out a number when he was being questioned last week by Congress:  His company, Facebook, would soon double the security team that monitors content on the site, to 20,000.  There are now 10,000 people who keep watch for the bad things that users can put on Facebook and the monkey businesses they can conduct through the website.  So that figure would be multiplied by two.  Wow, 20,000!  That seems like a lot.  And the lawmakers who questioned Zuckerberg must have thought so because nobody brought up what I am about to.  Facebook proudly claims to have 2 billion active users, although some question that number.  But let's give Zuckerberg that one — 2 billion users it is.  Divide 2 billion by 20,000 and you'll see that each one of Facebook's monitors will be responsible for keeping 100,000 Facebook users in line.

The Editor says...
With the current 200,000-to-1 ratio of users to censors, Facebook is remarkably effective at finding and suppressing conservative speakers.

Mark Zuckerberg: 'We Don't Think What We Are Doing Is Censoring Speech'.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted today to altering the site's algorithm to shut down certain speech on the platform.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives in Washington today [4/11/2018] where he admitted that Facebook does alter its algorithm to shut down certain types of speech.

Are conservative black women really 'unsafe' to hear?  Or just on Facebook?  Mark Zuckerberg may be a master of the universe, but there are two things even he shouldn't have done — one, allowing Facebook users' private information to be shared with Cambridge Analytica, and two, getting on the bad side of Diamond and Silk.  Error No. 1 is what brought Zuckerberg, the baby-faced founder of Facebook, to the halls of Congress last week to be grilled by politicians who can condone any political sin except the cardinal one — getting caught.

Big Tech Is a Boot Stamping on the Face of Diamond and Silk Forever.  I'm glad that at least some politicians are waking up to the seriousness of the problem of Big Tech's censorship of any voices which don't align with its left-liberal agenda. [...] What bothers me is how very much the liberal-left clearly doesn't reckon there's a problem at all, here, no sirree.

Zeroing In On Facebook's Anti-Conservative Tilt.  Conservatives are used to the national media excluding our viewpoint or loading up a pundit panel with eight liberals and one marginal Republican.  We're not going to be happy if the social media start hindering us from communicating with one another on what Zuckerberg claims is a "platform for all ideas."

Tim Scott Torches Facebook for Censoring Diamond and Silk.  Trump celebrities Diamond and Silk were told by Facebook they're "unsafe" for the community.  I'm not sure what community.  Or what exactly makes them unsafe.  But Senator Tim Scott has an idea.  [Video clip]

Mark Zuckerberg promises Cory Booker to protect Black Lives Matter from improper surveillance.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised Sen. Cory Booker on Tuesday [4/10/2018] to prevent improper police surveillance of groups such as Black Lives Matter and to work to ensure the social media platform's targeting tools are not used to redline ads for real estate and credit.  Using the five minutes allotted during a marathon hearing two Senate committees had with Zuckerberg about personal data privacy, Booker raised what he called "disturbing" reports that law enforcement groups had used Facebook to monitor African American organizations such as Black Lives Matter.  "I know you've expressed support for the group," Booker said.  "But there are a lot of communities of color worried that data can be used to surveil groups like Black Lives Matter, like folks who are trying to organize against substantive issues of discrimination in this country."

The Editor says...
Yes, I agree that there are "substantive issues of discrimination in this country."  And a lot of it has to do with Facebook and Google.

Obama Harvested Data from Facebook and Bragged About It.  Why Are We Only Freaking Out About This Now?  A short line is being drawn from Facebook data-profiteering to the election, still unfathomable to many Democrats, of some guy named Donald J. Trump.  Given the political leanings at Facebook, it seems unlikely that such an effect was deliberate.  In 2016, Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, struggled to find praise sufficiently fulsome to describe Hillary Clinton; in return, Sandberg was imagined as a Clinton Cabinet official.  This was approximately the same time as the flap over Trending Topics, during which we learned that Facebook's stable of editors seemed to shun conservative news sites instinctively.

Sen. Ted Cruz:  Facebook has been censoring or suppressing conservative speech for years.  When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee and Commerce Committee joint hearing Tuesday, I asked a relatively simple question: does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?  Zuckerberg said that Facebook is a "platform for all ideas," but declined to give a "yes" or "no" answer.  The problem is, this is not merely an academic distinction between words.  Facebook's answer to the question could affect millions of users, and attract (or prevent) a lot of attention from federal regulators.

Blackburn Takes on Zuckerberg Over Alleged Censorship:  Diamond & Silk Are 'Not Terrorism'.  Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) went after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the social media giant's alleged censorship of Lynnette "Diamond" Hardaway and Rochelle "Silk" Richardson when Zuckerberg testified before Congress on Wednesday.  Diamond and Silk, two outspoken supporters of President Trump, have alleged discrimination and censorship after they said Facebook branded them as "unsafe to the community."  The company later backtracked, but Diamond and Silk claim there are still algorithms in place that make it difficult for their fans to view their content — and other conservatives' content — on Facebook.

Ted Cruz Hammers Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook censorship of conservatives!  Ted Cruz really put Mark Zuckerberg on the spot today in regard to Facebook censorship of conservatives and conservatives sites, grilling him over specific pages that have been blocked by Facebook in what appears to be political bias, including the most recent Diamond and Silk.  [Video clip]

Ted Cruz Grills Zuckerberg on Facebook's Alleged Neutrality.  Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg ran smack into questions about the site's neutrality during his testimony in front of members of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) questioned Zuckerberg, asking if the site is a neutral platform for people to express different political opinions.  Zuckerberg said he is "very committed to making sure that Facebook is a platform for all ideas."  During his questioning, Cruz said that Americans are "deeply concerned" over allegations that Facebook engages in political censorship and bias.  Cruz mentioned the 2016 Gizmodo report which claims that Facebook's news curators section stopped topics such as the Conservative Political Action Conference and Mitt Romney from appearing in users' "trending" feeds.  He also mentioned various anecdotes that lead people to believe Facebook is biased against conservatives, such as Fox News' Todd Starnes having his Facebook post deleted (before receiving an apology).

Ted Cruz Grills Zuckerberg on Facebook Censorship:  Who Moderates Your Moderators?  While other senators on today's committee on Facebook panicked about "hate speech" and "fake news," Texas Senator Ted Cruz, alone, grilled Zuckerberg on an issue that matters to voters: censorship of dissident voices and political bias at Facebook.  Cruz raised a number of issues during his questioning, including the recent censorship of Diamond & Silk on Facebook, the controversial firing of Oculus VR founder Palmer Lucky, and the question of Facebook's legal status as a neutral public forum.

Facebook Bans German Historian for Saying 'Islam Is Not Part of German History'.  Last month, Facebook censored a German historian who posted a message about Islam's historic impact on Germany.  Facebook banned the historian for 30 days, even though 76 percent of Germans agree that Islam does not "belong to Germany."  Michael Hesemann, a journalist and Vatican historian with an honorary doctorate for his work in uncovering documents from the Armenian Genocide, posted a message that Facebook said did "not correspond to our community standards."  The offensive message was an accurate — if overstated — historical statement.

Zuckerberg says he's unaware of Facebook pushback for liberal groups after conservative targeting.  Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers Tuesday [4/10/2018]that he was "not specifically aware" of any instance where the social network had removed content posted by liberal groups amid concerns that the platform is biased against conservatives.  Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Zuckerberg that "a great many Americans" are "deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship."  Cruz then ticked off a list of conservative content that he claimed had been "suppressed" by Facebook, "including stories about [2012 GOP presidential candidate] Mitt Romney [and] stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal."  "In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page ... has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently blocked Trump supporters Diamond and Silk's page — with 1.2 million Facebook followers — after determining their content and brand were 'unsafe to the community.'

Facebook Has Dozens of Ex-Obama and Ex-Hillary Staffers in Senior Positions.  During his recent apology tour, Mark Zuckerberg notably failed to mention recent revelations about the Obama 2012 campaign's exploitation of the platform's weak pre-2014 data protections to harvest masses of data from non-consenting users.  The number of ex-Obama staffers on his payroll, according to Linkedin, might explain why.  The establishment media narrative on the Facebook data scandal hit a snag last month.  They hoped the story would be restricted to Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that they linked to the Cruz and Trump campaigns, and their alleged misuse of data.  But a bigger story soon emerged, linked to a longtime media favorite:  Barack Obama.

Mark Zuckerberg Lied:  Here Are Ten Charts to Show How Facebook Is Censoring Conservative Publishers.  Tech Giants Google and Facebook are currently purging conservative content from Facebook and YouTube[.]  They are hiding conservative stories on Google[.]  They are shadow-banning conservative news on all social media.  In February Facebook launched a new algorithm to ensure that conservative news would not spread on the social media platform.  This was after Facebook announced it was losing 50,000,000 user hours a day in the previous quarter.  The algorithm change caused President Donald Trump's engagement on Facebook posts to plummet a whopping 45%.

Facebook reconsiders 'unsafe for community' tag on pro-Trump Diamond and Silk videos after Fox & Friends appearance.  Facebook is reconsidering classifying videos produced by Diamond and Silk, two of President Donald Trump's most ardent supporters, as "unsafe to the community" after the dynamic duo went on Fox News' morning show asking why the embattled social media giant had labeled them as such.  In a statement to Fox News, a Facebook spokesperson said:  "We have communicated directly with Diamond And Silk about this issue.  The message they received last week was inaccurate and not reflective of the way we communicate with our community and the people who run Pages on our platform.  We have provided them with more information about our policies and the tools that are applicable to their Page and look forward to the opportunity to speak with them."

Diamond and Silk accuse Facebook of discrimination, censorship over 'unsafe' label.  Diamond and Silk, two fervent conservative supporters of President Trump, accused Facebook Monday night of discrimination and censorship after they said the social media giant branded them as "unsafe to the community."  Speaking with Fox News' Laura Ingraham on "The Ingraham Angle," the duo recalled what they called a months-long battle with the company after noticing a drop in engagement in September 2017.

Twitter threats to kill Rep. Goodlatte reveals multiple levels of leftist hypocrisy.  A man named Michael McGowan has been arrested in Roanoke, VA and is reported by WDBJ TV to have been charged with ["]'making a threatening communication through interstate commerce' Friday [4/6/2018], according to a release sent out by the Department of Justice.["]  Under the Twitter handle of LittleMac, McGowan has been threatening Goodlatte with execution, with absolutely no removal by Twitter, despite its longstanding notoriety for banning conservatives for violating community standards.

Diamond and Silk 'If a Private Bakery Has to Go Against Their Christian Values to Bake a Cake Then Zuckerberg Has to Allow us to Speak Our Truth'.  Diamond and Silk unloaded on Facebook Friday night [4/6/2018] after the social media giant finally responded to their many inquiries as to why Facebook is censoring their content and brand.  The dynamic duo boast over 1.2 million Facebook followers on their main Diamond and Silk page.

The NOT Dangerous Diamond And Silk Fight Back Against Facebook Attack.  As we and others reported Saturday [4/7/2018], Facebook, the social media giant once dubbed the "world's most dangerous censor," told the outspoken pro-Trump duo Diamond and Silk that their content was "dangerous" to their community.  If you are familiar with Diamond and Silk you will realize how ignorant that charge is.  If you aren't familiar with the two, a link to their facebook page and videos are at the end of this post and I suggest you go enjoy.  Appearing on Fox and Friends Sunday morning, the not dangerous pair shredded CEO Mark Zuckerberg, telling him to "suck it up, buttercup" and let them speak their truth.

Diamond and Silk Furious After Facebook Reveals Why Their Content Has Been Censored.  Diamond and Silk unloaded on Facebook Friday night after the social media giant finally responded to their many inquiries as to why Facebook is censoring their content and brand.  The dynamic duo boast over 1.2 million Facebook followers on their main Diamond and Silk page.

Did Twitter's CEO Just Share a Post Calling For 'Civil War,' Wiping Out the GOP, and How We Should Be Like CA?  Well, if there were any lingering doubts about Twitter's perceived bias against conservatives, look no further than what CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted out last night.  Apparently, a "good read" is a post co-written by a Center for American Progress senior fellow that calls for "civil war," the destruction of the GOP, and the adoption of how California runs everything from sea to shining sea.  Yeah, bipartisanship is dead, so mob rule is what's needed.  Now, to be fair, the "civil war" will be won at the ballot box and demographic shifts, namely through the so-called emerging Democratic majority, but the overall theme is quite explicit:  conservative Republicans are not welcome until they reform.  In other words, until they break to the power of progressivism.

Twitter CEO Shares And Raves About Article Calling For Dem Victory In Second 'Civil War'.  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey aroused controversy after labeling a Medium article "great" that claimed there's no "bipartisan way forward" in the United States and that the country is engaged in a "fundamental conflict between two worldviews that must be resolved in short order."  Dorsey shared the Medium article on his personal Twitter account Thursday night [4/5/2018], with the accompanying acclaim that it was a "great read."

Why is Twitter getting away with shadowbanning Ted Cruz?  Has Ted Cruz been shadowbanned by Twitter? [...] Ace draws his conclusion from a piece by Jim Geraghty, here, which describes how Ted Cruz, with 3 million Twitter followers, gets only a couple hundred retweets any time he says something there, while left-wing senator Kamala Harris, who has half his followers, gets thousands and thousands of retweets.

Facebook Labels All Breitbart Stories 'Intentionally Misleading' with Wikipedia Pop-Up.  Facebook is displaying a link to Wikipedia's smear-job description of Breitbart News next to all Breitbart articles shared on the site.  The linked Wikipedia article describes Breitbart as a "far-right site" that publishes "falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and intentionally misleading stories."  The social network, which has been under pressure from Democrats and the mainstream media since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, has added a button marked "about this article" next to all posts linking to Breitbart News pieces on the site.  Currently only viewable for American users, the button brings up a pop-up screen that displays Wikipedia's misleading description of Breitbart News.

Zuckerberg Starts Talking, And Makes Facebook's Problems Even Worse.  After days of silence in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking up a storm.  Given the kinds of things he's been saying, it might be better if he went back to his Silent Zuck routine.  Case in point is his interview with Vox.com, in which Zuckerberg managed to generate a new round of bad press over Facebook's privacy scandal, talked about having some sort of Supreme Court decide what constitutes "acceptable speech" and how Facebook hampers independent media outlets.  Oh, and he apparently thinks patriotism is arcane.  The latest privacy flap came when Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook scans private messages sent over its Messenger app and blocks those it deems inappropriate.  During the interview, he talked about blocking "sensational messages" that Facebook believed were meant to incite harm.  "Our systems detect that that's going on," he said.  "We stop those messages from going through."

Facebook Wants A License to Censor.  During her recent remarks in India, Hillary Clinton took aim at online free speech. [...] Clinton's remarks were not made in the abstract.  Rather, they were targeted to the alumni of the Obama Administration that migrated to tech and social media companies.  Those tech executives who were not Obama alumni were overwhelmingly 60:1 her donors, as Clinton received 95 percent of campaign contributions from tech executives and employees in 2016.  Her message in India was to them, and it was blunt:  you can't let the left lose again.  Message received.  Almost immediately after Clinton's remarks, Facebook announced that it was suspending SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that used data from Facebook for the Trump campaign in 2016.

Sadistic YouTube Deletes Channels, Demonetizes and Censors Content and Refuses to Respond to Press.  YouTube creators have been asking for over a year for YouTube to communicate honestly and fairly with its creators, demanding an explanation for why some channels are demonetized and others with similar content aren't.  Here's a recent example:  Mandy O'Brien has a popular body language channel on YouTube with over two hundred thousand subscribers.  She's funny and smart and provides good insight into human behavior.  While she seems to like Trump, her videos are not terribly political.  Most of them center around breaking news stories and reading the unspoken communications given off by interviewees on the news.  Her channel, Bombard's Body Language, was targeted for deletion by YouTube.  It all began after the Parkland school shooting, when O'Brien made a video about the body language of the untouchable David Hogg.

Facebook Shuts Down Fan Pages for Brazilian Presidential Candidate with 900,000 Combined Followers.  Brazilian newspapers reported Monday that Facebook had shut down two fan pages for conservative presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro over the weekend, leaving over 900,000 social media users in the dark about the fate of their groups.  Bolsonaro — a lawmaker with a military background who is running on an anti-corruption, socially conservative platform — has consistently polled in second place to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former socialist president convicted of corruption crimes and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

2,000 years too late Facebook bars Crucifixion as 'excessively violent'.  Now, as if Facebook didn't have enough troubles, a Roman Catholic university in Ohio is charging that the social media behemoth rejected its Easter ad last weekend because the crucifixion it depicted was "shocking, sensational and excessively violent."

Microsoft May Censor "Offensive Speech" Made Using Microsoft Products.  Microsoft is cracking down on what people say while using their services online.  According to a new services agreement written by the company, the tech giant is planning to ban accounts that use "offensive language" and will go through your private data to "investigate" users.  In a March 1 release, Microsoft is warning customers using Office, Xbox, Skype, and other products that the company is prohibiting offensive language and inappropriate content starting on May 1.

Microsoft Joins the Censors.  The Left has enlisted Big Tech to help suppress conservative activism and conservative ideas.  We are seeing this on a number of fronts, one of the more recent (March 1) being Microsoft.  Microsoft announced a new Service Agreement effective May 1 that applies to the company's "consumer products, websites, and services."  Those include the Office suite, Xbox and Skype, among others.  The new Service Agreement includes a Code of Conduct: [...]

Facebook Suppresses Certain Media Outlets In Your Newsfeed.  It Won't Tell You Which Ones.  Within the span of eight days in January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two different key changes to Facebook's newsfeed algorithm that together have boosted a "trusted" minority of news outlets while suppressing their competitors.  First, Facebook would slash news articles' share of the newsfeed from five percent to four percent in the coming months, Zuckerberg said.  Second, Facebook would boost certain "trusted" news outlets and suppress other, ostensibly less trustworthy sources.

Top Psychologist on Tucker Carlson:  The Threat of Google-Facebook to Manipulate Elections is Absolutely, Positively Profound.  Dr. Robert Epstein is a research psychologist at the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology.  On Friday [3/23/2018] Dr. Epstein joined Tucker Carlson to discuss an upcoming presentation on "The Search Suggestion Effect (SSE): How Search Suggestions Can Be Used To Shift Opinions and Voting Preferences Dramatically."  The AIBRT researchers looked at the power of Google and Facebook to influence elections.  The study spanned five years of investigations.

YouTube Bans Firearms Channels.  Those who follow firearms, shooting, and tactical channels on YouTube know about the travails of Hickok45 on YouTube.  Venerable and old school, Hickok45 tests and comments on firearms manufacturers send him.  Sometimes he shoots his own firearms, but always, he shoots, comments and often provides history and mechanical commentary on the machines he is using.  Sometimes it is with admiration, sometimes slight disdain, but always honest and interesting.  Hickok45 met with disapproval from some redditors when he supported the NRA in light of the compromises the NRA recommended (e.g., bump stocks, enhanced background checks), but being a former LEO and old school like he is, I wouldn't have expected anything else from him.  Just as interesting to me is Jeff Quinn of Gunblast, especially when shooting and commenting on revolvers, but always interesting.

The Social-Media Panic.  "Make no mistake:  2016 will never happen again."  Historians are not always reliable predictors of the future, but Niall Ferguson's analysis of how Silicon Valley and the center-Left would react to the successive and surprise victories of Brexit and Donald Trump is proving correct.  Conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.  Silicon Valley is working with its media and governmental critics to limit the damage to the center-Left going forward.  You can see the dynamic in the way that the media generates a moral panic out of stories about how Brexit and the Trump election happened, and the way Silicon Valley responds.  Fake news becomes a problem, and Silicon Valley responds by hiring progressive journalists as censors.  I mean "fact-checkers."  You can see it in the demonetization of YouTube videos.  Or in the new sets of regulation being imposed in European countries that deputize the social-media networks themselves as an all seeing social censor.

Mark Zuckerberg Has No Way Out of Facebook's Quagmire.  I think I understand why Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg hasn't publicly responded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.  He's stuck in a catch-22.  Any fix for Facebook's previous big problem — fake news — would make the current big problem with data harvesting worse.  As a media company and one of Americans' top sources of information, Facebook's de facto anonymity and general lack of responsibility for user-generated content make it easy for propagandists to exploit.  Making matters worse, it isn't willing to impose tighter identification rules for fear of losing too many users, and it doesn't want to be held responsible in any way for content, preferring to present itself as a neutral platform.  So Zuckerberg has been trying to fix the problem by showing people more material from friends and family and by prioritizing "trusted publishers" and local news sources over purveyors of fake news.

Facebook Tells Publishers It Will 'Minimize the Bad' and 'Promote Quality'.  Facebook Head of News Product Alex Hardiman expressed the company's plans to "redefine its relationship" with news publishers in an effort to "minimize the bad" and "promote quality" during a panel at the South by Southwest film festival.  CNN reports that during a panel discussion at the South by Southwest film festival, Facebook's head of news product, Alex Hardiman, stated that the social media platform was working on "redefining its relationship" with news publishers.

The Great Social Media Purge:  No One Is Safe.  Social media is often abuzz with politics — from immigration and gun control to infrastructure and tariffs.  Rarely is the social media itself the topic of discussion.  But now is long past time for that discussion.  It is certainly no secret that social media companies are overwhelmingly left-wing, fueling the fake "Russia" conspiracy theory, and endlessly bashing President Donald Trump.  But now, the social media giants of the Internet — Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (one of the main subsidiaries Alphabet, which is the corporate parent of Google) — have been preparing their next big, heinous move:  an attempt to ban right-wing voices outright from their platforms.

The Great Information War is Here.  A few days after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, many conservative commentators began to notice they were also being targeted.  They were not being "flamed" by bloggers or online trolls but instead were simply erased from social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube by the Big Tech companies.  Some of them were little known, while others were popular media figures such as Dennis Prager and Mike Cernovich.  In some cases, their videos were taken down on YouTube without warning; or their Gmail accounts were terminated without explanation; or their Twitter pages were shadowbanned.  Much of the censored material had nothing to do with the Parkland tragedy.  It was simply a moment for the Left to flex its muscles.

The Worst Purge Of Conservative Voices In The History Of The Internet.  In recent weeks, we have witnessed an unprecedented social media crackdown on conservative voices.  YouTube's war with Alex Jones has gotten the most attention, but literally hundreds of conservative content creators have had their accounts penalized, suspended or deleted by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants.  There appears to be a coordinated effort to target conservative viewpoints, because similar voices on the left are not receiving equal treatment.

Sebastian Gorka Calls For Social Media Companies To Stop Censoring Conservatives And Start Censoring ISIS.  Former White House deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka said social media companies should stop worrying about censoring conservatives and start censoring radical Jihadis instead, Thursday [3/8/2018] on "Fox & Friends."  "Al Qaeda's publications like 'Inspire,' the publications of ISIS as well — they're all out there still on the internet.  They have detailed instructions.  That's how the Boston bombers made their pressure cooker bombs.  Those instructions were on one of the Jihadi publications," Gorka said.  [Video clip]

Twitter refuses to comment on Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitic tweets.  Twitter has refused to comment on anti-Semitic tweets from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, including one where he writes "the Jews have control over those agencies [FBI] of government."  When reached for a response by Fox News, a Twitter spokesman said the company does not comment on individual accounts.  The spokesman pointed Fox News to the company's help center, where it details its enforcement options and its approach to enforcement philosophy and policy development.

The Corporate War on Free Speech.  One of my countless gripes about the grotesquely empty public display of sneering moral condescension that is the modern left is their continued posturing that they are fighting the power rather than representing it, consciously or otherwise.  Conveniently ignoring the legions of discrimination lawyers, human-resources hall monitors, and corporate-diversity rectal inspectors, modern progressives are somehow able to maintain the delusion that "corporations" are by definition right-wing entities.  Of course they are.  That must be why Google canned James Damore for daring to suggest the world's largest company was hopelessly biased in favor of leftists.  It also must be why it seems that the only people getting banned from social media or fired from their jobs based on nothing more than their opinions are those who are critical of the left.

Twitter is Censoring Donald Trump Jr.'s Twitter Feed — On a Drudge Report Tweet on Maxine Waters.  Tech Giants Google, Twitter and Facebook are currently purging conservative content from Facebook and YouTube — They are hiding conservative stories on Google — They are shadow-banning conservative news on all social media.

Obama Pressures Facebook to Censor News; Zuckerberg Complies and Crushes Trump on Facebook.  Facebook has caved to Democrat political pressure and is censoring newsfeeds on users' pages, as Mark Zuckerberg explains, for their own good.  The progressives at Facebook have gone nuclear. [...] After Donald Trump's election, Zuckerberg came under tremendous pressure to use Facebook for the Democrats' Resistance.  All the bludgeons were brought out — Russian bots, fake news, that Facebook handed an unearned victory to Trump.  And the greatest of all, the threat of government regulation.  At first Zuckerberg resisted the Resistance, but then he caved suddenly, following a personal intervention by Obama.

Twitter suspends user for calling Maxine Waters 'crazy old lying lunatic in a bad wig'.  Bastion of free speech, Twitter is not.  Maxine Waters has been accusing critics of being Russian bots, and apparently @TrueJackDaniel didn't appreciate it.

Companies Suspend Ads On Alex Jones, InfoWars' Youtube Channel After CNN Contacts Them.  Many companies have suspended advertising on Infowars' Youtube channels after CNN contacted them about their ads appearing on the website.  A CNN article published Saturday reads, "CNN has discovered ads on InfoWars' channels from companies and organizations such as Nike (NKE), Acer, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Network, the Mormon Church, Moen, Expedia (EXPE), Alibaba (BABA), HomeAway, the NRA, Honey, Wix and ClassPass."  The article also indicates that after CNN got in touch with the companies, many suspended their ads.

Snopes Fact Checks, Facebook Threatens Satire Site for Mocking CNN.  The Christian satire site Babylon Bee has been fact-checked by Snopes and threatened by Facebook after it published an Onion-style article about CNN about purchasing a washing machine to "spin the news."

Satire Website Babylon Bee is Being Marked as Fake News on Facebook.  I'll be the first to admit I've been snagged by a few Babylon Bee headlines.  Not to the point I needed them fact-checked.  More of a double-take.  "Wait, did this really happen... oh, you Babylon Bee guys!"  But that's just me.  Others have needed the stories fact-checked for them.  To the point where Facebook is threatening to penalize the Bee's Facebook page.

Exclusive: Trump's Facebook Engagement Declined By 45 Percent Following Algorithm Change.  Engagement on Donald Trump's Facebook posts has dropped by approximately 45 percent since the platform introduced a new algorithm change, following a year of pressure from left-wing employees and the mainstream media for "allowing" the President to win the 2016 general election.  In January, Facebook introduced a major change to its newsfeed algorithm.  In a post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the change aimed to give greater emphasis to posts from "friends, family and groups" and less to "businesses, brands and media."  The change was followed by a promise to promote what Facebook calls "broadly trusted" news sources on the platform.

Exposing Parkland 'Shooting' Crisis Actor David Hogg gets you 3 Day Suspension From Facebook.  Just presenting a Video showing David Hogg and fellow actors recording on a Cell Phone an Anti Gun message during the 'Actual Shooting', while they were whispering and 'hiding' in lock-down, is enough to get a 3 days suspension from Face-it-facebook-is-working-for-the-enemy (Facebook).

Laura Loomer Banned From Facebook For 30 Days For Post Calling David Hogg A Liar.  Investigative journalist Laura Loomer received a 30-day banishment from Facebook Monday [2/26/2018] after she wrote a post calling student and gun control activist David Hogg a liar. [...] "Everything in my post was factual.  These interviews compiled together show that David Hogg... is lying during his interviews," Loomer said in a statement.  "If you watch the video, he says his sister lost 4 friends, 3 friends, and then 2 friends during the school shooting, which reveals a flaw in his narrative and suggests he isn't telling the truth," Loomer stated.

Stop treating the Southern Poverty Law Center like it's a respectable and responsible organization.  YouTube has tapped the Southern Poverty Law Center to help it police objectionable content, according to the Daily Caller.  Hopefully, this isn't true.  But if it is, it's a disaster.  YouTube couldn't have chosen a worse or less trustworthy partner.  The SPLC is a dishonest, irresponsible and obnoxiously partisan organization.  Trusting them to decide what constitutes objectionable and "extremist" content, as YouTube's more than 100 "Trusted Flaggers" have been asked to do, is like asking the inmates to run the asylum.  YouTube's monitoring program dates to 2012.  However, according to the Caller, it has "exploded in size in recent years amid a Google push to increase regulation of the content on its platforms, which followed pressure from advertisers."

Exclusive: YouTube Secretly Using SPLC To Police Videos.  The Southern Poverty Law Center is assisting YouTube in policing content on their platform, The Daily Caller has learned.  The left-wing nonprofit — which has more recently come under fire for labeling legitimate conservative organizations as "hate groups" — is one of the more than 100 nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and government agencies in YouTube's "Trusted Flaggers" program, a source with knowledge of the arrangement told The [Daily Caller].  The SPLC and other program members help police YouTube for extremist content, ranging from so-called hate speech to terrorist recruiting videos.

Important free speech case filed against Twitter.  [I]t all started when Twitter banned Jared Taylor and American Renaissance from its platform.  Breitbart has a long report on the case.  I think Taylor has a good case, but you know how our court system has become (too often these days) the place where Leftwing ideology has found its home and Constitutional protections are lost, so I won't dare to predict how this could turn out.

Free Speech' Suit Aims to End Twitter's Political Censorship.  A group of free-speech lawyers filed the most serious legal challenge yet to Twitter's censorship policies Tuesday in San Francisco County Superior Court, seeking a ruling preventing Twitter from banning users purely on the basis of their views and political associations.

CNN is Directly Lobbying YouTube to Shut Down Infowars.  CNN is now directly lobbying for YouTube to terminate Infowars from its platform entirely, with the news network brazenly admitting as much in an article published today [2/23/2018].  The piece, entitled, How the Florida school shooting conspiracies sprouted and spread, notes how an Infowars video questioning whether Parkland school shooting survivor and now anti-gun activist David Hogg was being coached on what to say during interviews was removed by YouTube.  CNN then relates how it "identified three similar YouTube videos from InfoWars" which were brought to YouTube's attention for potential removal.  A YouTube spokesperson responded that those videos were also now under review.

YouTube Restricts PragerU's Planned Parenthood Video, Then Reverses Course.  Conservative digital media organization PragerU tweeted Monday that its latest YouTube video on Planned Parenthood had been restricted soon after it was posted.  PragerU observed that, just hours after it was posted to Google-owned platform YouTube, a video that is narrated by Lila Rose, president of pro-life organization Live Action, was placed in "Restricted Mode."  In the video, titled What You Need to Know about Planned Parenthood, Rose discusses "deceptions" generated by Planned Parenthood, including its claim to be a "healthcare provider," and that abortion constitutes only three percent of its services.

Alt-right leaders can no longer spread disinformation on Medium.  Medium has suspended the accounts of Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and Laura Loomer.  Unfortunately, this means that "articles" like Cernovich's "How I Would Run for Congress" are no more.  Links to any of the suspended accounts (or their published works) redirect to the dreary white suspension page, which reads "This page is unavailable."

Undercover Video Reveals How Twitter Silences Conservatives.  If it's not bad enough that Facebook is now picking and choosing which news you see in your newsfeed, the most recent undercover video from James O'Keefe's Project Veritas has revealed exactly how Twitter actively silences conservative users.  Last month, Project Veritas released an undercover video in which Twitter Senior Network Security Engineer Clay Haynes says that Twitter is "more than happy to help the Department of Justice with their little [President Donald Trump] investigation."  They followed up that video with another video featuring eight current and former Twitter employees, who reveal that Twitter silences conservatives through a technique called "shadow banning."

Facebook Ad Executive Rob Goldman Apologizes for having "Uncleared Thoughts".  After President Trump re-tweeted a discussion thread from Facebook VP of Ads Rob Goldman, which cited analysis done last year of Russian ad purchases/engagement, the liberal hive instantly attacked the executive.  According to Wired.Com Rob Goldman quickly began apologizing for expressing "uncleared thoughts", where those thoughts are actually based on facts — but run counter to the necessary liberal narrative — so they must be repelled at all costs.

Mark Zuckerberg colludes with Russia.  As of this week, Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, is now directly colluding with Putin to influence world opinion in favor of the tyrant's regime.  It's happening before your very eyes.  Zuckerberg created one of the world's largest and most important platforms for spreading news and information — and fake news and disinformation.  It was one of the platforms Russian and other foreign propagandists used most effectively in 2016 to pass off lies as real news stories and to spread messages designed to divide Americans by race.  But what Facebook once allowed through organizational passivity, it is now doing willfully.  Zuckerberg's company, the owner of Instagram, has caved to pressure from Moscow and has agreed to suppress Instagram posts that Putin's critics have dug up and presented as concrete evidence of astounding official corruption.

The Urgent Case for Legislation against Facebook and Google.  Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths.  It is good to see establishment outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and National Review coming to the same conclusion, or at least asking the same questions.  Just this week, Facebook launched its latest of many attacks on my news site, the Geller Report.  It labeled my site as "spam" and removed every Geller Report post — thousands upon thousands of them, going back years — from Facebook.  It also blocked any Facebook member from sharing links to the Geller Report.  The ramping up of the shutting-down of sites like mine is neither random nor personal.  The timing is telling.  The left is gearing up for the 2018 midterm elections, and they mean to shut down whatever outlet or voice that helped elect President Trump, the greatest upset in left-wing history.  In fighting this shutdown, we had to go back to the drawing board in our lawsuit against these social media giants.

Facebook:  Calling For The Murder Of AfD Members 'Does Not Violate Our Community Standards'.  Though Germany has the most strict censorship regime in the world when it comes to censoring right-wing political speech on social media, calling for members of the patriotic Alternative for Deutschland party to be murdered is A-OK.

YouTube: Keeping Americans In The Dark On Islam.  In certain respects, the real struggle between Islam and the West has less to do with an inherently weak Islam and more to do with subversive Western elements that cover up for and thus empower Islam.  Out-and-out censorship is one of these tactics.

Google Must Be Destroyed.  In "The New Censorship" Robert Epstein examines the methods Google employs to censor voices it disagrees with such as manipulating the auto-complete results, altering images displayed in Google Maps, and demonetizing YouTube videos its employees find offensive.  Epstein writes, "If a librarian were caught trashing all the liberal newspapers before people could read them, he or she might get in a heap o' trouble.  What happens when most of the librarians in the world have been replaced by a single company?  Google is now the largest news aggregator in the world, tracking tens of thousands of news sources in more than thirty languages and recently adding thousands of small, local news sources to its inventory.  It also selectively bans news sources as it pleases."

Libertarian Banned from Facebook for Tide Pod Joke That Mocked Liberals.  Facebook doesn't seem to think Tide Pods are a joking matter.  Tom Champlin, who owns the libertarian news aggregator The Liberty Review and runs its associated Facebook page, was slapped with a 30-day Facebook ban for posting a Tide Pod meme.  His post showed a screenshot of a teen who was stupid enough to bite into a Tide Pod; the caption said, "This is why I can't pay for your health insurance." Facebook sent Champlin a message telling him that his post had violated the site's community standards and he would be temporarily locked out of his profile as a punishment.

Facebook is a 'living, breathing crime scene,' says one former tech insider.  With more than 2 billion users, Facebook's reach now rivals that of Christianity and exceeds that of Islam.  However, the network's laser focus on profits and user growth has come at the expense of its users, according to one former Facebook manager who is now speaking out against the social platform.

Facebook, Google tell Congress they're fighting extremist content with counterpropaganda.  Facebook, Google and Twitter told Congress Wednesday that they've gone beyond screening and removing extremist content and are creating more anti-terror propaganda to pre-empt violent messages at the source.  Representatives from the three companies told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that they are, among other things, targeting people likely to be swayed by extremist messages and pushing content aimed at countering that message.  Several senators criticized their past efforts as not going far enough.  "We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence.  That's why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts," said Monika Bickert, Facebook's head of global policy management, according to an advance copy of her testimony obtained by CNBC.

Twitter's army of peeping Toms.  [James] O'Keefe's latest video reveals that Twitter — according to its own employees — is paying "hundreds of people" to examine "private" messages sent by Twitter users to one another.  The nine-and-a-half-minute video ought to be enough to convince anyone to avoid using Twitter for any messages that might cause embarrassment to the sender.  The blackmail potential revealed is stunning, as is the sheer creepiness of the entire effort.

Someone Needs to Sort Out the Tech Idiots on Censorship.  The real relationship between politics and government is the gangster relation: nice little business you got here; pity if something should happen to it.  Most conservatives don't have a gangster bone in their bodies and really don't want to get in the faces of good honest businessmen.  Problem is, then all the businessmen in America will end up paying protection money only to the Democratic Party, because liberals do care about power and do want to tell business who is boss.  Unless our leaders throw a bit of elbow, these poor innocent businessmen will continue to truckle to the liberal activist agenda as the path of least resistance.  Then one day they will wake up, like the National Football League, to find out that their customers are leaving in droves.

Tech Totalitarians.  Leftists are apparently so fearful of competing in the arena of ideas, they are literally eliminating those competing ideas — and often, the people who espouse them — at the social websites more and more Americans use to communicate with each other, or get their "news."  And these very same corporate entities, replete with people best described as fascist-minded tech nerds, are also determined to eliminate privacy.  We begin with Project Veritas' undercover investigation revealing that Twitter is infested with techies willing to "ban a way of talking," as engineer Steven Pierre puts it.  How?  Former Twitter Software Engineer Abhinov Vadrevu reveals the company uses a technique called "shadow banning."

Facebook's Feed Filtering.  In what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls "a major change in how we build Facebook," the company announced Thursday that it plans to reduce publisher and brand content in news feeds while prioritizing what friends and family interact with.  "[R]ecently we've gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other," Zuckerberg wrote yesterday in a Facebook post.  "Since there's more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what's in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do — help us connect with each other.  We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren't just fun to use, but also good for people's well-being."

Twitter Leaks:  Employees Describe Extreme Social Justice Warrior Climate at Tech Giant.  Twitter has sprung a leak.  In several exclusive interviews with Breitbart, former employees of the company reveal a company dependent on celebrities, hostile to free speech, and silently fuming at President Trump's continued dominance on the platform.  It corroborates the recent Project Veritas exposé of a platform that is hopelessly biased and committed to censoring non-progressive voices.  Our first source, who, like the others, wishes to remain anonymous, described how the company rapidly abandoned its commitment to free speech after former CEO Dick Costolo was replaced by Jack Dorsey, who the source described as "the definition of a social justice warrior."  The majority of Twitter's management, says the source, believes the leftist idea that "hate speech is violence."  They "absolutely" believe in the idea that "abuse scares people off the platform," and that certain types of speech "silence" other speech.

Undercover Videos Expose Twitter's Dirty Secrets.  Shadowbanning is the censorship that social media companies do in the shadows.  It's cowardly and dishonest.  And it's how the big firms get away with covertly censoring conservatives.  "The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don't know they've been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content," Abhinav Vadrevu, a former Twitter employee, explains in Project Veritas' undercover investigation of the company.  "They just think that no one engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it."  Shadowbanning is the perfect metaphor for the big lie of social media.  The big companies claim to empower you while they actually take away your voice.  And they do it without you realizing it.

Project Veritas Bombshell:  Twitter Engineers Explain How They 'Shadow Ban' Conservatives.  No, you weren't being paranoid.  Everything you ever suspected about Twitter censoring right-wing opinions through "shadow bans" is true.  In his latest sting, conservative muckracker James O'Keefe caught eight current and former Twitter employees admitting on camera that they engage in the practice.  Twitter tries to present itself as a politically neutral media platform, but as this latest Project Veritas bombshell video confirms, it is anything but.  Abhinav Vadrevu, a former Twitter software engineer, explained how "shadow banning" works at a San Francisco restaurant on January 3, 2018.

Twitter Engineer Admits to Banning Accounts that Express Interest in God, Guns, and America.  Twitter direct messaging engineer Pranay Singh admitted to mass-banning accounts that express interest in God, guns, and America, during a Project Veritas investigation.  "Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers.  They'll all be like, guns, God, 'Merica, and with the American flag and the cross," declared Singh, who was secretly recorded by Project Veritas reporters.  "Like, who says that?  Who talks like that?  It's for sure a bot."

Facebook Bans Bestselling Author over 'The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama'.  Bestselling conservative author Matt Margolis has a new book coming out that is already banned on Facebook.  Margolis's first book, The Worst President in History, which detailed the failures of the Obama administration, was an instant hit last fall.  Margolis used social media to market his presidential biography to #1 on Amazon.  When he tried to market his latest, The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama, he was banned from Facebook groups for six days with no explanation.

Twitter Security Engineer Says Company 'More Than Happy' to Give DOJ Trump's DMs.  Big corporations like Twitter and Google wield enormous power over those they disagree with, and in the age of Trump, it's only gotten worse.  As Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared on his show last night, "the federal government is no longer the main threat to your privacy and to your freedoms.  Big corporations are the main threat to your freedom and your privacy."  Carlson pointed out that "the government doesn't own your private emails, Google does."  A new Project Veritas undercover investigation seems to confirm Carlson's point as it regards Twitter to an alarming degree.  The social media platform is unfriendly to conservatives in general but positively hostile to President Donald Trump.  And if one of their senior employees is to be believed, they may be voluntarily violating his privacy to provide his direct messages to the Department of Justice.

How to Get Kicked Off YouTube.  The first time YouTube sent me a one-way ticket to ride was right after I saw a video in Pittsburgh of a large group of large "teenagers" surrounding and beating a smaller "teenager."  But everything was blurred out — faces and voices.  I called the victim's mom in Pittsburgh and asked if I could get a copy of the original video, unblurred.  Soon I was watching a totally different, far more sinister scene:  a large group of black people were surrounding a smaller white kid, harassing, threatening, taunting, and ultimately beating him.  That's what I do in my books, articles, videos, and podcasts:  I expose the enormous level of black violence and how reporters and public officials are in denial, deceit, and delusion about it.  This was just another example, one of many thousands that we document, wildly out of proportion.  Soon after the video went up, good ol' Colin was going down:  YouTube said the video encouraged violence against children.  I told YouTube I was exposing violence against children.  People who removed that video were complicit in that violence.  YouTube did not care, and off I went.

How Conservatives Are Being Destroyed by Facebook, Twitter and Google Without Even Realizing It.  So, why would Facebook want to kill extremely successful Facebook pages that its users enjoyed?  One of the reasons goes back to something I told multiple reporters during the 2016 election.  I believe that all of the thriving right wing Facebook pages activated large numbers of what I like to think of as "instinctive conservatives."  You know, the sort of people who love God, guns and America, but who don't follow politics day to day, read National Review or consume any of Milton Friedman's books.  From what I could see on Facebook, that group of people [loved] Donald Trump and I believe they were responsible for getting him the GOP nomination and probably even got him over the hump in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  I think the liberals that run Facebook came to that same conclusion.

Google caught in the censorship cookie jar again?  The Daily Caller reports that Google has taken to throwing shade almost exclusively on conservative websites through its search engine mechanism, using a sort of "fact-checking" system to discredit certain news-providers so no one will want to click on them.  Kind of an odd thing for a search engine company to do, given that its business is built around gaining clicks.  But it's not the first time the Silicon Valley giant has been accused of disguised censorship against conservative news outlets under the guise of the war on fake news.

Google's New Fact-Check Feature Almost Exclusively Targets Conservative Sites.  Google, the most powerful search engine in the world, is now displaying fact checks for conservative publications in its results.  No prominent liberal site receives the same treatment.  And not only is Google's fact-checking highly partisan — perhaps reflecting the sentiments of its leaders — it is also blatantly wrong, asserting sites made "claims" they demonstrably never made.  When searching for a media outlet that leans right, like The Daily Caller (TheDC), Google gives users details on the sidebar, including what topics the site typically writes about, as well as a section titled "Reviewed Claims."  Vox, and other left-wing outlets and blogs like Gizmodo, are not given the same fact-check treatment.

Charles C. Johnson Sues Twitter In Landmark Free Speech Case.  GotNews Editor-in-Chief Charles C. Johnson filed a landmark free speech lawsuit against Twitter in California State Superior Court today [1/8/2018].  The lawsuit documents the social media giant's unlawful censorship of Johnson — and the damages it caused Johnson — on several fronts.  Johnson, who is represented by Robert E. Barnes of Barnes Law, details various causes of action demonstrating how Twitter's actions violated the Unruh Civil Rights Act as well as the California and United States constitutions.

Google Sued for Censorship of Conservatives.  Leftists often accuse you of the thing they are really guilty of.  So, when the left tries to smear conservatives with labels such as Nazis, Fascists, and intolerant, they are really describing themselves.  Case in point is the story of Prager University, run by radio-talk-show host Dennis Prager whose videos on YouTube have received restricted status making it impossible for people to watch.  Thus, Prager fought back suing Google and YouTube for violation of his First Amendment rights.

Climate Skeptic Censorship by Google, Twitter, and Microsoft LinkedIn.  Twitter has behaved the worst.  If it doesn't like one tweet in a paid promotion, it halts all promotions by the account.  This happened to me twice, and I stopped trying after that.  Twitter bans tweets with "inaccurate content."  Twitter doesn't even bother to phrase it as "content that we consider inaccurate."  It's as if Twitter's management considers itself an omniscient and omnipotent divine power.

How Twitter protects Planned Parenthood from the truth.  "Offensive."  "Inappropriate."  Even "fake news."  Increasingly, media outlets and pro-choice politicians are labeling pro-life groups with these derogatory terms and openly calling on social media outlets to censor pro-life voices, especially those with increasingly large online followings.  They cite how "dangerous" it is that our message is reaching millions of people each day.  This past summer, for example, the Washington Examiner reported that social media giant Twitter prevented Live Action from advertising to build our audience while allowing abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and others free rein to reach out to virtually anyone.  Twitter defended its actions, calling our content "inflammatory."  But what did it deem so offensive?  A picture of a child developing in the womb and ultrasound images like the ones expectant parents hang on refrigerators.

Twitter's purge of far-right accounts sparks backlash, praise and confusion.  The rules that took effect Monday [12/18/2017] broaden the tech firm's hateful conduct policy to permanently suspend any account that displays "violent threats, multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear or reduces someone to less than human."  The policy also targets groups or individuals that promote violence on and off the platform.  Thus far, suspended accounts include white nationalists like Jared Taylor and his publication American Renaissance, Britain First's Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, a European white supremacist group known as Generation Identity, the American Nazi Party and the New Black Panther Party.

YouTube assigns 10,000 employees to censor videos.  Google will assign 10,000 staff members to eliminate what the company regards as extremist content on YouTube next year.  YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki wrote at Britain's Daily Telegraph that some YouTube users were exploiting YouTube to "mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm."  Google owns YouTube.  She wrote that YouTube is using "computer-learning" technology to find extremist videos.  Since June, more than 150,000 of these videos have been removed, she said.

FCC Chairman Blasts Twitter for Censoring Tweets from Pro-Life Groups.  The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has excoriated the social media platform Twitter for censoring pro-life posts and other social conservative viewpoints.  FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says that Twitter is employing a "double standard" in blocking conservative content while leaving liberal messaging untouched.

Twitter Admits It Doesn't Understand Its Own Policies, After Suspending PJ Media Terror Expert.  After President Donald Trump retweeted false videos about radical Islamic terrorism last week, Twitter changed its rationale for allowing the tweets to remain up.  In explaining the new reason, Twitter's CEO admitted that the social media platform had misinterpreted its own policies.  This was a crucial admission, following the nearly week-long suspension of PJ Media D.C. editor Bridget Johnson, an award-winning journalist and terror expert, with no explanation.

Who's Really Censoring the Web?  As [FCC chairman Ajit] Pai suggests, the real threat to an open Internet doesn't come from your cable company but from Google/YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others.  All these firms have aggressively censored.  For example, Google recently kicked would-be Twitter competitor Gab out of its app store, not for anything Gab did but for what it refused to do — censor content.  Twitter is famous for censoring, as Pai observes.  "I love Twitter, and I use it all the time," he said.  "But let's not kid ourselves; when it comes to an open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem.  The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate."

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Calls Out Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Silicon Valley for Censorship and Internet Content Manipulation.  The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, fired a direct shot across the bow of the technocrats who control social media platforms today [11/28/2017].  Chairman Pai righteously called out Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other platform control agents for being ideologically biased, and using their platforms to target their ideological opposition.  Defending his plan to roll back Obama's one-sided internet rules, the Chairman outlined how he intended to ensure a free, fair and open internet.

Twitter allowing BuzzFeed to dictate which accounts are 'propaganda' accounts.  It's rare that two corporations cooperate on anything, much less the politically charged topic of "propaganda."  But Twitter has apparently given the website BuzzFeed the power to identify suspected "propaganda" accounts on the social media giant that Twitter can then suspend.  I frankly don't care if every one of those accounts is part of a Russian propaganda plot.  That's not the issue.  The issue is two liberal companies cooperating to interfere with the free flow of information.

More Proof: How Google Skews Autocomplete to Protect Democrats.  Google's "Autocomplete" function has operated since 2008 to assist users in searching for the right phrases.  How does it work? [...] Well, it's based on actual searches, so long as they don't negatively impact Democrats.

If we don't fight now, conservatives will vanish from the internet.  How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off?  Easy.  It's becoming a business model.  Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard.  This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red.  Forget politically unbiased algorithms.  The ratings will be conducted by "qualified, accountable human beings" from teams of "40 to 60 journalists."  Once upon a time, journalism meant original writing.  Now it means deciding which original writing to censor.

Google Can No Longer Be Trusted With Private Data.  Google needs to stop treating its users like lab rats for its machine learning.  Already, their attempt to crack down on YouTube videos have cost perfectly well-meaning and sometimes entirely apolitical channels thousands of dollars in ad revenues over absurd misapplications of the rules by content flagging bots.

11-minute Trump Twitter outage prompts company investigation.  President Trump blamed his 11-minute Twitter account outage on Thursday [11/2/2017] on a "rogue employee."  "My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee.  I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact," Trump tweeted early Friday morning.  Twitter launched an internal investigation Thursday after a "customer support" employee, reportedly working his or her last day with the company, briefly deactivated the highly viewed account of the president.

Twitter: Employee 'inadvertently' deactivated Trump's account.  Twitter attributed a brief disappearance of President Trump's personal Twitter account on Thursday night to "human error" on the part of one of its employees.  "Earlier today @realdonaldtrump's account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee," Twitter said in a statement posted to the platform.  "The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored.  We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again," Twitter added.

Roger Stone Says He Will Sue Twitter Over Account Suspension.  Longtime Trump associate Roger Stone Jr. said he will sue Twitter in response to the company banning him from the platform.  "I have retained one of the best telecommunications lawyers in the country and will be bringing a legal action against Twitter over the suspension of my account," he told TheWrap.  "The battle for free speech has just begun."  Stone would not publicly name the attorney until he signed a retainer agreement, which he said he expected to do Monday [10/30/2017].

Forget Washington.  Facebook's Problems Abroad Are Far More Disturbing.  For months, Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., has been in crisis mode, furiously attempting to contain the damage stemming from its role in last year's presidential campaign.  The company has mounted an all-out defense campaign ahead of this week's congressional hearings on election interference in 2016, hiring three outside communications firms, taking out full-page newspaper ads, and mobilizing top executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, to beat back accusations that it failed to prevent Russia from manipulating the outcome of the election.  No other predicament in Facebook's 13-year history has generated this kind of four-alarm response.  But while the focus on Russia is understandable, Facebook has been much less vocal about the abuse of its services in other parts of the world, where the stakes can be much higher than an election.

Google Preaches 'Net Neutrality,' Then Censors Conservative Videos?  YouTube promises that it is "a community where everyone's voice can be heard."  But that promise doesn't seem to apply if the voice espouses conservative viewpoints.  The latest evidence of this comes from Dennis Prager, a conservative talk-show host whose syndicated column appears regularly in IBD and who also runs Prager University.  PragerU produces hundreds of educational videos from academics and other experts on various topics, ranging from the history of the Korean War to Israel's founding.  There's no profanity, no nudity, no calls to violence.  But the videos do give conservatives a voice.

Twitter Bans Two Kremlin-Backed News Outlets From Advertising.  Twitter announced on Thursday [10/26/2017] that it would ban RT and Sputnik, the two Kremlin-backed international news outlets, from advertising on its platform, intensifying the battle over Russian propaganda on social media and prompting an immediate threat of retaliation from the Russian Foreign Ministry.  The decision marks one of the most aggressive moves by an American social media company against the outlets, which United States intelligence officials have linked to a wide-ranging Kremlin effort, both covert and overt, to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.  Twitter's ban comes as United States authorities are pressuring RT, formerly known as Russia Today, to register as a foreign agent under a World War II-era law intended to curtail Nazi propaganda.

Prager University SUES Google & YouTube for Censoring Conservatives.  Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock knows that Google and YouTube have been taking serious and discriminatory action against conservatives and anyone who has an opinion that is contradictory to that of the "advertisers."  We have taken this for a while now, but someone is finally taking legal action.  Dennis Prager of Prager University is taking this discriminatory practice to the courtroom and is determined to bring attention to the matter, which has been largely ignored in the media.

PragerU sues Google, YouTube for 'censoring' conservative videos.  PragerU, a conservative educational site, is suing Google and its subsidiary YouTube, accusing the video site of censoring its online videos because of their political leanings.  The company filed the suit on Monday, saying that YouTube had been "restricting" some of their videos, which cuts them off to viewers with certain parental settings and prevents them from generating ad revenue.  "Watch any one of our videos and you'll immediately realize that Google/YouTube censorship is entirely ideologically driven," Dennis Prager, PragerU founder, said in a statement.

Patriot outraged as Facebook 'BANS' him from calling himself English.  A proud patriot has slated social media giant Facebook after it banned him from using the word "English" in his profile.  Electrician Tim Cox, 54, was given the nickname "English" at school and has been using it on his profile since he signed up to the site nine years ago.  But it has now been removed by Facebook chiefs after a complaint from a fellow user.  The site says the word "English" represents a violation of its policies on fake names, despite other profiles using the names of mass murderers like Peter Sutcliffe or Osama Bin Laden.

Apple Removes Pro-Life App from App Store.  Apple removed a pro-life app from its App Store after misleading stories about the app were published over the summer.  The app, Human Coalition, allows "pro-life individuals and church groups to pray for Human Coalition's abortion-seeking clients, who remain anonymous, in real time."

Twitter Suspends Rose McGowan's Account.  Rose McGowan had a hold placed on her Twitter account Wednesday night [10/11/2017], an act that quickly sparked outrage among the many users who have been following her posts ever since news first broke of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein.  The actress, who has emerged as a Hollywood voice after finding herself thrust into the center of the developing story of sexual misconduct, harassment and assault allegations against the movie mogul, took to her Instagram and Facebook accounts to relay the news of her temporary suspension, [...]

James O'Keefe Busts YouTube Deciding What Is 'Legitimate' News, and What Isn't.  James O'Keefe's Project Veritas has released a follow-up to its exposé of bias at the New York Times earlier this week.  This time, the target is YouTube, the ubiquitous video-sharing platform owned by technology giant Google.  Project Veritas picks up where the first video left off, in conversation with the Times' Audience Strategy Editor, Nicholas Dudich, a former Democratic campaign operative who was shown suggesting that his political views informed his work publishing Times videos on social media platforms.

Reassessing Orwell to Understand Our Times.  Social media have great power to narrow the range of acceptable thought.  On Facebook, those who openly support a politically correct view — what appears to be the popular majority view — are frequently lauded with thumbs up, while dissenters often remain silent to avoid being criticized or denounced.  All of which leads to what is called "the spiral of silence," which reinforces the groupthink of what seems to be the social and cultural majority.

10 reasons to stay calm about those Russia Facebook ads.  [#1] Of the group of 3,000 ads turned over to Congress by Facebook, a majority of the impressions came after the election, not before.  Indeed, in a news release Monday [10/2/2017], Facebook said 56 percent of the ads' impressions came after the 2016 vote.  [#2] Twenty-five percent of the ads were never seen by anybody.  (Facebook also revealed that Monday.)  [#3] Most of the ads, which Facebook estimates were seen by a total of 10 million people in the United States, never mentioned the election or any candidate.

YouTuber Demonetized Hours after Rush Limbaugh Reads Her Article on His Show.  On the same day that Rush Limbaugh read my recent column on air, YouTube — in the dead of night — demonetized a large percentage of videos on my channel.  My YouTube channel has been around for years with many recordings of very boring village meetings highlighting local Chicago-area corruption.  Recently, I started doing reaction videos and comedy and gained a bunch of new subscribers and it's been fun.  I don't swear (certainly no "F" words) and there's nothing really controversial unless you count making fun of gender-confused rabid leftists with blue hair "controversial."  Yesterday, October 5, after Rush read my article on his show, I made a video that included my reaction to him talking about it on the air.  It wasn't up for three hours before my videos started getting the dreaded yellow dollar signs — which means YouTube just took away my ability to be paid for them.  YouTube made sure that whatever bump in subscribers or views I got from Rush would not benefit me in any way.

YouTube Has Joined Other Social Media In Censoring Conservatives.  Social media was a brazen boon for the free press, who were virtually shut out of the national, televised media landscape which has been dominated by the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and other liberal outlets for decades.  Print news, however fleeting their time in the spotlight may be, also tends to fly left of center thanks to decades upon decades of democratic infiltration.  The internet, however, was once a land of opportunity for everyone.  A level playing field of exposure and ideology.  That is, until Facebook, Google, and their subsidiaries discovered a tool that they too could use to funnel their own political beliefs to the forefront.

Here's an example of what Facebook WILL allow:
Russian-bought Black Lives Matter ad on Facebook targeted Baltimore and Ferguson.  At least one of the Facebook ads bought by Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign referenced Black Lives Matter and was specifically targeted to reach audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, sources with knowledge of the ads told CNN.  Ferguson and Baltimore had gained widespread attention for the large and violent protests over police shootings of black men.  The decision to target the ad in those two cities offers the first look at how accounts linked to the Russian government-affiliated troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency used geographically targeted advertising to sow political chaos in the United States, the sources said.

The Curious Case of the Democrats vs Zuckerberg.  The worst kind of fight in one in which you wish for both sides' demise. [...] Watching Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defend his digital empire before menacing lawmakers was one such brawl.  In early September, Facebook disclosed that it had suspended hundreds of accounts associated with a St. Petersburg-based website that dispensed pro-Kremlin propaganda.  The long-held suspicion that Putin operatives attempted to influence the 2016 election was confirmed.  Then the levee broke.

Facebook admits it promoted fake Vegas massacre stories.  Facebook admitted Monday [10/2/2017] that its system automatically promoted stories that falsely identified the shooter in the Las Vegas massacre.  The social network said links from websites such as The Gateway Pundit and others were posted and spread across their site Sunday night.  The stories claimed the shooter was an "anti-Trump" Democrat and displayed pictures of a man who is not identified as a suspect.

The Long Night Ahead.  Facebook just declared war against "disruptive" information.  In addition to hundreds of new human censors, they are training AI censors capable of identifying and deleting 'unacceptable' information found in the discussions of all two billion members in real time. [... But] Disruption, although potentially painful in the short term, doesn't last, nor is it truly damaging over the long term.  In fact, the true danger posed by an internetworked world is just the opposite of disruption.  This danger is an all encompassing online orthodoxy.  A sameness of thought and approach enforced by hundreds of millions of socially internetworked adherents.  A global orthodoxy that ruthless narrows public thought down to a single, barren, ideological framework.  A ruling network that prevents dissent and locks us into stagnation and inevitable failure as it runs afoul of reality and human nature.

Amazon defends deleting one-star reviews of Hillary Clinton's new book.  Amazon is getting flak for policing the reviews posted on its page for Hillary Clinton's new book, which went on sale this week.  The internet quickly realized Wednesday that some of the reviews of "What Happened" — notably 1-star reviews — were being removed.  But the company defended its move, saying it had the right to make sure that reviewers were actually commenting on the product at hand, not just expressing dislike of the former Democratic presidential candidate (of which there is plenty, nine months after the election).

Former Muslim, Anti-FGM Campaigner Shazia Hobbs Suspended from Twitter.  A Muslim apostate and high profile campaigner against both female genital mutilation (FGM) and forced marriage has been suspended from micro-blogging platform Twitter, amidst a wider crackdown on right wing voices on the website, and other online platforms like Facebook.  Twitter users noticed the prolific writer and campaigner had vanished from the platform Friday [9/1/2017].

Imposing 21st Century Sensibilities on 18th and 19th Century Actions.  Perhaps the most beloved hymn of the past two centuries is Amazing Grace [...] Yet if one-issue social pressure continues to mount, Amazing Grace may disappear from politically-sensitive YouTube, Facebook, Google, and more broadly from popular culture.  Why?  Because the man who wrote this hymn, English sailor John Newton, had been a slave trader before experiencing a Jonah-like miraculous salvation of his own. [...] The ultimate "logic" of Black Lives Matter will see the destruction of Monticello and the Jefferson Memorial, Mount Vernon and the Washington Monument, the defacing of Mount Rushmore and — perhaps — the renaming of Washington DC and the State of Washington.  One wonders.  With Washington and Jefferson now under fire, can Amazing Grace be far behind?

Google's 'Left-wing bias has alienated its own workers'.  Internet giant Google has been accused by one of its own employees of 'alienating conservatives' with its politically correct left-wing bias.  A senior software engineer at the company claimed in a document that was distributed to colleagues that right-wing employees were forced to keep their views 'in the closet' to avoid hostility.

YouTube continues to restrict many PragerU videos.  Fight back!  YouTube does not want young people to hear conservative ideas as they currently list 28 PragerU videos — over 10 percent of our entire collection — under "restricted mode" making it impossible for many young people to access our videos.

Facebook Blocks More Than Two Dozen Popular Catholic Pages Without Explanation.  Social media giant Facebook blocked more than two dozen conservative Catholic pages in a 24-hour period, some with millions of followers, saying only they were "suspected of suspicious activities."  Facebook seemed to target only conservative Catholic pages with a significant following, since almost all had between hundreds of thousands and up to six million followers, according to Catholic News Agency (CNA), which broke the story.

Google Censors Popular Pro-Life Page With Extensive Abortion Information.  The Abortions in America page, which displays graphs and data about a wide variety of abortion facts, had been receiving an average of about 16,000 views per month — all with virtually no promotion.  Since the fact page was created in October 2012, web stats show the page steadily increased in popularity.  The page's views peaked in January 2017, at 37,111 views, and was well on the way to a record-breaking year.  Within the month of May, views mysteriously decreased by more than half over the previous month.  In June, it received only 1,512 views.  During the last seven days of June, it only received 307 views.  It appears that OperationRescue.org has been singled out by Google for discrimination.

Supreme Court strikes down sex offender social media ban.  The Supreme Court struck down a North Carolina law Monday [6/19/2017] that bars convicted sex offenders from Facebook, Twitter and other popular sites.

YouTube removes latest Planned Parenthood video on judge's order.  YouTube removed a video showing top Planned Parenthood officials making gruesome comments about abortion on the order of a federal judge in California.  U.S. District Judge William Orrick, who granted the preliminary injunction in favor of the National Abortion Federation to halt the release of the videos, ordered any links to the video to be removed after it was published by the Center for Medical Progress on Thursday [5/25/2017].  Judge Orrick also ordered CMP lead investigator David Daleiden and his attorneys to appear in court June 14, The Associated Press reported, for a hearing where he will consider holding them in contempt for releasing the footage.

Facebook says it will act against 'information operations' using false accounts.  Facebook Inc acknowledged on Thursday [4/27/2017] that it has become a battleground for governments seeking to manipulate public opinion in other countries and outlined new measures it is taking to combat what it calls "information operations" that go well beyond the phenomenon known as fake news.  In a report and summary of response plans on its website on Thursday, Facebook describes well-funded and subtle efforts by nations and other organizations to spread misleading information and falsehoods for geopolitical goals.

How the Media Try to Lay Waste to the Trump Administration.  The war on "fake news" could extend into the censorship of social media.  Former Federal Election Commission chair Ann Ravel told a UC Berkeley audience that "We know that there's a lot of campaigning that's moved to the Internet, whether it's through fake news or just outright advertising and there is almost no regulation of this, very little."  In the past, Ravel has called for the regulation of political websites such as The Drudge Report.  "Ravel claimed that the use of Facebook and other social media platforms by political campaigns is a problem," reports Breitbart News.  She also claimed that "by 2020 most of the advertising is going to move from television to the Internet" — i.e., to unregulated space.

Facebook Gives Staff Green Light to Protest Trump on May 1.  Facebook Inc. said it won't punish employees who take time off to join pro-immigrant protests on May 1.  And, in a nod to security staff, janitors, shuttle-bus drivers and others who work for Facebook contractors on campus, the company also said it will investigate if any of its vendors illegally crack down on their employees' protest rights.

#FakeNews Purveyors Snopes and Politifact Now Adjudicating #FakeNews for Google.  Google rolled out a new feature Friday for its search browser, which uses media outlets like Politifact and Snopes to help combat "fake news."  After inputting a search query on the tech conglomerate's platform, a user is shown results with "fact checks for one or more public claims" or news stories. [...] Snopes, Politifact, or any such publication deciding which news stories are legitimate leads to editorializing as fact checking is prone to subjectivity.  This notion is further evidenced in that not a single fact checker at Snopes comes from a conservative background, which a Daily Caller investigation revealed.  In fact, Snopes employs liberals and leftists almost exclusively.

'Hunt & Kill All White Women' Facebook Post Deemed Not Hate Speech.  "White women should be hunted and killed then we won't get white babies who think the(y) own the world," the user posted.  When the post was reported by another user for "hate speech," Facebook responded with the message, "We reviewed the comment you reported for displaying hate speech and found it doesn't violate our Community Standards."

$53M Fines for Politically Incorrect Social Media Posts?  In a move designed to chill free speech, a German "justice" official has proposed fining social-media sites up to $53 million for not swiftly deleting "hateful" posts.  Welcome to the new Germany — same as the old Germany. [...] While German Ministry of Justice spokesman Piotr Malachowski had in January cited entries such as "gas the Jews" as an example of the kind of repugnant postings justifying government action, that's just a selling point.  The extreme concern over politically incorrect online speech arose only after Germany invited an influx of unassimilable Muslim migrants, who are generally impossible to vet and sometimes criminally inclined, prompting some Germans to complain online.  The current crackdown is aimed at anti-Muslim sentiment — not anti-Jewish sentiment.

Arrest Of Twitter User Could Have Serious Implications For The World Of Internet Trolling.  John Rivello was arrested Friday months after he allegedly sent a tweet that caused journalist Kurt Eichenwald to suffer a seizure.  This arrest appears to be the first of its kind and presents serious implications for the world of internet trolling, which seeks to annoy fellow users.  Eichenwald's attorney Steven Lieberman and cyber jurisprudence expert Peter Stephenson told The Daily Caller Sunday they are unaware of any similar cases where an internet message or posting causing bodily harm and resulted in an arrest.

Chilling story of one twisted oddball and a handful of anonymous activists who appointed themselves as censors.  [Scroll down]  Last month, 'Hillbillyholiday' was the architect of a cynical PR stunt which saw this newspaper publicly smeared by damning its journalism 'unreliable'.  He and 52 like-minded anti-Press zealots, almost all of whom remain anonymous, collaborated in a vote which persuaded Wikipedia, the sixth most popular website in the world, that it ought to ban the Daily Mail.  The move by the online encyclopedia — which was founded in 2001 and has in a few short years become a hugely influential source of information — was revealed in the pages of the Left-wing Guardian newspaper.  It reported that Wikipedia's editors had decided, in a democratic ballot, that the Mail's journalism cannot be trusted.

Google adds tool to flag 'offensive' search results.  Google is now directing its review teams to flag content that might come across as upsetting or offensive in search results.

Marine Le Pen could be jailed for three years for 'distributing violent images' over ISIS beheading tweets.  French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has lost her European parliament immunity from prosecution in an obscene videos case that could see her jailed for three years.  The 48-year-old leader of the far-right Front National (FN) now faces being summoned by a French judge, and being charged with 'distributing violent images'.  Le Pen caused outrage by using Twitter to publish films including one showing the decapitated U.S. journalist James Foley.

The Wikipedia Purge.  Conservative circles, especially in the US, have long been accusing Wikipedia of bias.  Some disgruntled users have set up Conservapedia.com, as you may have guessed, in order to provide a conservative counterweight.  They compiled a list of examples of (mostly left-wing) bias in Wikipedia.  Often it is about subtle differences:  the page about the former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet (as it exists today) mentions that his government was a dictatorship, while Fidel Castro's page says that "critics say he was a dictator."

Twitter Removing Core Functions, Banning Alt-Right to Create Liberal Safe Space.  Twitter, Reddit and others are going on banning sprees to censor "alt-right" voices.

Twitter Suspended My Account When I Dared To Defend Myself Against A Liberal Reporter's Smear Campaign.  During the election I launched #TrumpCup, a Twitter movement encouraging my followers to write "Trump" on the name of their cups at Starbucks.  The idea was for Trump supporters to stand in solidarity with their candidate against a massive corporation (Starbucks) that had lashed out against him.  It went viral.  For days it was Twitter's #1 trend.  It got massive coverage by all the major mainstream press outlets.  The trend came and went and then, out of the blue, it was being used to label me a white-supremacist.  Did you follow that leap of logic just then?  Me neither.

Is Twitter Throttling Trump Supporters?  [Scroll down]  Mike Keen says that Twitter carries out another form of throttling this on tweets from President Trump.  After Trump's initial Tweet, the first few moments afterwords may show top tweets from Trump supporters, but soon those disappear and all the reply tweets to Trump are negative reactions from leftists.  "Every single Tweet by President Trump has top comments that are 100% negative.  Positive replies are simply not seen.  Twitter is absolutely censoring Pro-Trump replies and Trump supporters from voicing their support of the President."

Is Google News Suppressing Center-Right News Sites?  The big story this evening is the fact that President Trump has fired the acting Attorney General, a far Left Obama holdover.  Her dismissal was well-deserved, given the fact that she ordered the Justice Department to ignore the Commander-In-Chief's entirely legal order, one similar to bans enacted by Presidents Obama and Carter.  But I was fascinated to see the Google News coverage of the event.

YouTube removes influential conservative website's channel.  The YouTube channel of influential conservative politics and law website Legal Insurrection has been removed by the video sharing service, citing copyright infringement claims.  "This account has been terminated because we received multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the user posted," explains YouTube, in a notice posted to channel's page.  Legal Insurrection founder and publisher and Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson voiced his anger and astonishment at the channel's removal.  "It's very frustrating, it's very scary, to have 8 years of content removed without a chance to defend yourself," he told FoxNews.com.

The Coming Speech Wars Online.  As political speech evolves, new threats emerge as old ones cling to power.  The fight for free political speech isn't over, but it has changed, and we must remain vigilant lest our freedom slip.  About 87 percent of Americans use the Internet and 74 percent use social media, the Pew Research Center recently found.  For campaigns, this means that the communications gatekeeping function is as obsolete for campaign consultants as it became for network-news executives last century.

Facebook's New Arbiter Of News Is A Former CNN Anchor Who Can Barely Hide Her Anti-Conservative Bias.  Former CNN anchor Campbell Brown announced on Facebook Friday that she has been hired by Facebook to lead its news partnerships team.  The social media company has been pressured to help decipher and purge news stories that are false or unsubstantiated, even though doing so in a completely objective way will be a difficult (perhaps virtually impossible) task — especially when Brown has a history of holding an anti-conservative bias.

Fed-up with Facebook.  I made perhaps the worst mistake of my life recently when I happened to investigate Facebook, a site I've never had an account on (nor shall I ever). [...] At first I noticed a recurring trend:  Every single person, many of whom do not even know each other, all had French-Flag colors over their pictures, so as to immortalize the Paris massacre.  These are the same people fighting for Islamists to pour into their cities and their towns. [...] I suppose that what alarmed me the most (save the abundance of meaningless tattoos) was the ethereal obsession with Hillary Clinton.  There were links to no other sites — I kid you not — than CNN, Huffington Post, and Slate.

Fake News and Fake Intelligence.  Fact and truth are often very different things. [...] Most arbiters of truth are self-anointed.  Mark Zuckerberg is a modern example, the poster child for Millennial vacuity and the nerd generation.  The CEO of Facebook, enfant terrible of herd exploitation, is about to appoint a posse of thought police to monitor and censor "fake news" on the internet.  If you are devotee of Facebook news, you might have the civic awareness and attention span of a gerbil.  Still, Zuckerberg is a good modern example of how digital wealth gets confused with maturity or wisdom.  Having Zuckerberg, or any cyber-cohort, as a digital news cop is a little like appointing Bill Clinton as scoutmaster for a Girl Scout troop.

Facebook Fact-Checker PolitiFact Funded by Clinton Foundation Donor.  Alberto Ibarguen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, one of PolitiFact's largest contributors, donated $200,000 to support the 8th annual Clinton Global Initiative University meeting in February 2015.  The President Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton-hosted event was held in Miami, Florida where the the Knight Foundation is based.  The Knight Foundation also gave between $10,000 and $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, Politico reports.

Guess Who's Behind Facebook's New 'Fake News' Detector?  As anyone active on the Internet is aware, there have been increasing calls for social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to address the mostly manufactured crisis of "fake news" making its way onto people's computer screens. [...] Yesterday [12/17/2016], Facebook announced that it was going to employ a variety of "fact-checking" organizations to make sure no "fake news" made it onto people's Facebook news feeds.  So Facebook will be using Snopes, PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, ABC News, and the Associated Press, among others, to check its members' postings and label them as "fake news" if these organizations determine them to be so.  One problem:  these organizations themselves are among the biggest purveyors of real fake news!  PolitiFact has a whole website dedicated to exposing the organization's biases.  The popular site Snopes is in fact run by a husband and wife out of their home in California.

Mollie Hemingway Speaks Truth to Facebook: 'PolitiFact Is a Joke'.  Mollie Hemingway over at The Federalist has made a list of "5 Major Problems With Facebook's Attempt To Limit 'Fake News'."  The most passionate argument was with PolitiFact.  The second problem listed was "PolitiFact is a joke.  They should be trusted with nothing.  They are the worst candidates to adjudicate fakery in the entire media establishment.  Even among the disreputable 'fact' 'checking' class, they are noteworthy for their awfulness."  They cannot be trusted with hard facts on Planned Parenthood.

'Neutral' PolitiFact Rated Just 15% of Trump's Campaign Claims as True but 51% True for Hillary.  PolitiFact rated just over 15% of Donald Trump's campaign claims as true, while marking 51% of Hillary Clinton's as such, according to PolitiFact Executive Director Aaron Sharockman.  "I've been tracking every @PolitiFact fact-check of the 2016 candidates since they announced," posted Sharockman on Twitter just one day before the election.  "I think this will be the final score."

Guess Who's Behind Facebook's New 'Fake News' Detector?  As anyone active on the Internet is aware, there have been increasing calls for social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to address the mostly manufactured crisis of "fake news" making its way onto people's computer screens.  The mainstream media, which finds itself increasingly viewed as untrustworthy by the American public, has latched on to the idea that the relatively free flow of ideas and opinions on the Internet actually poses a threat to our well-being.  As could be expected, political leaders jumped in early on this attack on independent media.

Facebook announces strategy to tackle fake news.  Facebook has announced its plan to tackle fake news by harnessing fact checking and, potentially, making disputed stories appear lower in users' News Feeds.  "We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we're approaching this problem carefully," said Adam Mosseri, Facebook's VP of News Feed, in a blog post Thursday [12/15/2016].  "We've focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our community and third party organizations[.]"  The issue of fake news on Facebook has been a hot topic for months, particularly during the recent U.S. presidential election.  In one hoax article, for example, Pope Francis was falsely reported to have endorsed Donald Trump.

Clinton mega donor George Soros leads line-up of liberal billionaires who are funding Facebook's fake news fact checker.  Billionaire Clinton donor George Soros is among a line-up of wealthy liberal figures who will fund Facebook's fake news fact checker.  The 86-year-old Hungarian financier's Open Foundation Societies is listed among organizations which are backing The International Fact Checking Network, the body tasked with flagging bogus news stories to social media users, on its website.  Soros, a staunch Democrat who tried to block George W. Bush's campaign in 2004, has given $25 million to Clinton and causes dear to her.

The real truth about Facebook's 'fake news' filters.  Before the 1990s, the mainstream media had a monopoly on the news.  Then came the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the internet.  This was a wonderful thing for freedom of information.  Facebook has already faced a scandal for having "filtered out stories on conservative topics from conservative sites."  But to get an idea of how bias also affects fact checkers, just consider a few evaluations from Politifact.

George Soros Finances Group Helping Facebook Flag 'Disputed' Stories.  The organization partnered with Facebook to help determine whether a certain story is "disputed" is financed by billionaire George Soros and a slew of other left-wing funders.  The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) drafted a code of five principles for news websites to accept, and Facebook yesterday [12/15/2016] announced it will work with "third-party fact checking organizations" that are signatories to the code of principles.

Facebook under fire for picking 'liberal' outlets to fact-check.  Mark Zuckerberg is taking heat from the right for Facebook's new "fact-checking" initiative to police fake news.  Conservative pundits and publications are charging that most of the third-party organizations recruited this week to filter fake news stories from Facebook have a track record of liberal bias.  Snopes, ABC News, Politifact and FactCheck.org all "have records of left-wing partisanship — particularly throughout the 2016 election," Breitbart News reported Thursday [12/15/2016].  For example, the alt-right news site noted, Politifact had reported it was "mostly false" when Donald Trump claimed in a presidential debate that Hillary Clinton wanted "open borders."

Left-Wing War On Conservatives Websites:  Facebook, Google, LA Times, Obama Take Aim.  The left-wing elites and their running dogs in the enemedia are in one of their fictional publicity campaigns that they masquerade as urgent news.  Their latest terror is "fake news sites."  The New York Times reported shortly after the election that Google and Facebook "have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election's outcome."  That was fake news in itself:  "fake news" didn't influence the presidential election's outcome, all too real news about the wrong direction in which our nation was headed under Barack Obama did.  Nevertheless, the Times said that "those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites' revenue sources."

Facebook Develops Censorship Tools to Gain Access to Chinese Market.  To say that Facebook has a spotty record where privacy and censorship are concerned would be an understatement. [...] Now, for the sake of gaining official access to China, Mark Zuckerberg's company has developed tools to allow the Communist Chinese government unrestrained censorship of Facebook posts. [...] While there is little doubt that Facebook would profit from access to China's 600 million Internet users, Beijing would be the real beneficiary of any deal between the social media giant and the communist regime.

Reddit CEO admits he secretly edited comments from Donald Trump supporters.  He made the admission on Reddit, where he posts under the username Spez.

Facebook's ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg's headache.  Mark Zuckerberg has a credibility problem.  The tech mogul's Facebook just admitted to finding more "bugs" in the way it measures ads — and once again, those bugs benefited Facebook.  The social-networking giant said Wednesday it has found numerous errors in the ways it calculates how many people view its ads, artificially inflating their perceived value to advertisers and publishers.  Key metrics that Facebook has exaggerated include the weekly and monthly reach of marketers' posts, which got inflated by 33 percent and 55 percent, respectively, as the site improperly included repeat visitors in its figures.

Actor James Woods quits Twitter over its recent mass censorship and "alt-right" account purge.  The Duran reported the other day on "alt-left" social media platform Twitter, declaring war on "alt-right" user accounts, in what was a massive deletion of profiles Twitter deemed "hateful".  Instead of being a neutral platform where voices and opinions were communicated, Twitter consciously decided to take sides in a wider social debate between right and left.  Politically correct behavior has consumer Twitter, and the damage being done to its bottom line will not go unnoticed by shareholders.

Actor James Woods leaves Twitter over alt-right 'censorship'.  Actor and producer James Woods has decided to quit Twitter, citing censorship concerns. [...] Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank, said in an interview his personal Twitter account and accounts for the institute and his magazine were all suspended this week without notification.

Twitter Holocaust:  SPLC Has Dozens of Alt-Right Accounts Deleted, Then Brags About It.  Twitter has entered a new phase in their war against free expression.  The same place that once claimed to represent the "free speech wing of the free speech party" has now decided to wipe out numerous alt-right accounts at the behest of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which claims expertise when it comes to so-called hate speech (when in reality they're just a far-left advocacy group). I've long loved Twitter, and somehow I've escaped the death squads so far, but things don't look very good for the future.

Want to Really Make America Great Again?  Stop Reading the News.  Twitter isn't designed to help you get in and get out with the best information as quickly as possible — it's supposed to suck you into either a contentious world of argument and debate or an echo-chamber that reassures you everyone thinks like you do.  Facebook is supposedly one of the largest news sources in the world, and days after the election, it disavowed that the news it shared could have possibly impacted users behavior in a significant way.

YouTube censors video about left-wing censorship after liberals exploit flagging algorithm.  A video by Prager U about left-wing censorship was ironically listed as 'restricted' by YouTube, making it inaccessible to schools, libraries and young users whose parents have YouTube filters enabled.

YouTube Censors Video on ... Left-Wing Censorship.  What do you suppose happens on YouTube to a video that is a "discourse on the First Amendment and the tactics that progressives are using to limit speech and political engagement by conservatives"? Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, it falls victim to an algorithm with absolutely no sense of irony.  A video titled "The Dark Art of Political Intimidation" was posted last week by WSJ columnist Kimberly Strassel as a PragerU lecture.  "Within several hours of PragerU posting the video," said a WSJ editorial, YouTube placed it in 'restricted mode,' making it inaccessible to schools, libraries and young Americans whose parents have enabled YouTube technology filters."

Facebook reportedly allows advertisers to exclude racial groups in housing ads.  Facebook advertisers can now exclude racial and ethnic groups when creating a housing ad on the social media site, according to a report from ProPublica.  The feature, called "ethnic affinities," lets advertisers exclude certain groups of Facebook users.  Under the federal Fair Housing Act, people are prohibited from discriminating based on race, gender, religion and other factors.  ProPublica created an ad aimed at house hunters and got it approved in 15 minutes despite excluding African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanics.  Facebook declined to comment to the site about its approval.

YouTube blacklists PragerU educational videos.  YouTube has placed 21 PragerU videos on "restricted mode," a category meant for inappropriate and objectionable adult and sexual content.  PragerU stands for Prager University.  Its four- to five-minute videos promote Judeo-Christian values and principles and are ideal for young people as they distill complex issues into concise bullet points with stimulating graphics.  "We've worked quietly behind the scenes for months to resolve this, but YouTube's censorship continues, leaving us with no option but to go public," PragerU announced Tuesday [10/11/2016] on its Facebook page.

Fraudbook: Top Facebook Democrat funding 'Republicans for Clinton'.  Cast as a grassroots Republican movement for Hillary Rodham Clinton, most of the money for "Republicans for Clinton" is actually coming from a key Democrat and onetime co-founder of Facebook, according to a new investigation.  Billionaire Democratic megadonor Dustin Moskovitz has forked over 70 percent of the donations to the Super PAC's started by two former George W. Bush advisors, essentially muddying the whole point that it is a group of Republicans so upset with Donald Trump that they'd back Clinton.

Facebook Co-Founder Drops $35M to Defeat Trump.  Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, has donated tens of millions of dollars to defeat Donald Trump.  Moskovitz is not one of the usual Democrat deep-pocketed suspects.  Politico reports that his donations came "suddenly and without any advance warning to the top rung of Democratic party megadonors with two unheralded tears through his checkbook in the past six weeks."  The party is excited about adding their own Sheldon Adelson-esque donor into the political mix.  Democrats don't need as much money as Republicans do because Republicans don't get billions of free media advocacy from the networks and cable stations, and they don't get free promotion from the Hollywood crowd, from ESPN, from the NFL, and from "volunteers" from the labor unions.

Facebook employees fume after push to censor Trump posts rebuffed.  Some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's posts on Facebook have set off an intense debate inside the social media company over the past year, with some employees arguing certain posts about banning Muslims from entering the U.S. should be removed for violating the site's rules on hate speech, according to people familiar with the matter.  The decision to allow Mr. Trump's posts went all the way to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who ruled in December that it would be inappropriate to censor the candidate, according to the people familiar with the matter.  That decision has prompted employees across the company to complain on Facebook's internal messaging service and in person to Zuckerberg and other managers that it was bending the site's rules for Trump, and some employees who work in a group charged with reviewing content on Facebook threatened to quit, the people said.

The Roof Blows Off the Echo Chamber.  There is no news cycle.  There is no national debate.  There's no Ed Murrow, no Walter Cronkite, no figure of authority from whom the public can learn the facts with a reasonable degree of trust. [...] Sixty-two percent of Americans get at least some of their news via social media according to a Pew Research survey and the proportion is growing fast.  Facebook and other social media allow individuals to customize their news consumption on the basis of recommendations and re-posting by friends, and news consumers increasingly depend on their networks rather than the media. [...] Only one in nine Americans believes that Hillary Clinton is "honest and trustworthy."

Twitter Suspends Activist James O'Keefe After Posting Clinton Video.  Twitter temporarily suspended the account of conservative activist James O'Keefe around the same time he released a video of Wisconsin Democratic senatorial candidate and former Sen. Russ Feingold, saying that Hillary Clinton might use executive order on gun control if she is elected president, according to The Daily Caller[.]

Twitter Forces O'Keefe To Delete Tweet Critical Of Hillary Staffer In Order To Get Account Back.  Conservative activist James O'Keefe had to delete a tweet critical of a Hillary Clinton staffer Thursday afternoon [10/13/2016] in order to regain use of his account after it was suspended for a day.  O'Keefe's account was suspended Wednesday afternoon in the hours before a release of a new hidden camera video which exposed a Clinton ally saying she could use executive action on guns.  The Daily Caller reached out to Twitter about the suspension and a spokesman said, "We don't comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons, but you can review our policy on posting private information."

The Purges Are Activated.  Social media monopolies have begun large-scale purges of any and all effective pro-Trump voices using their platforms.  CH was blocked two weeks ago from Twatter.  Today, Ricky Vaughn got suspended (until further review post-election?).  Apparently, Scott Adams was kicked off as well.  The night of the long knives is right on cue, one month before The Trumpening.  Leftoids have lost the argument.  Now they reach for the only weapon they have left:  silencing.

FEC Complaint Accuses Clinton Campaign of Illegally Working With David Brock's Super PAC.  A legal complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday [10/6/20167] accuses the Hillary Clinton campaign of illegally coordinating with David Brock's super PAC.  The Campaign Legal Center charges that Brock's PAC Correct the Record contributed nearly $6 million in in-kind donations to the Clinton campaign in the form of coordinated expenditures, Law Newz reported.  Such donations are prohibited by federal law, according to the complaint.  Brock launched Correct the Record in 2015 to serve as a rapid response team for Clinton's presidential bid.  The PAC pledged to spend $1 million to "push back" against users posting negative comments about the Democratic nominee on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram.

Facebook Thought Police Purge Over 100,000 Comments In One Month Alone Because They Said They Were "Hateful".  Per official Facebook statistics released for the first time, 100,000 comments were purged for being "hateful."  If that is not bad enough, it is even more disturbing that this number only comes from one country.  What does that say about the rest of the world?

Trump Supporters Outraged Facebook Bans 'Deplorable' Profile Names.  Ever since Hillary Clinton's PR blunder referring to Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables," Trumpeters have squandered no opportunity to appropriate the word for their own snarky uses. [...] Hundreds of Facebook users have jumped on the Deplorable bandwagon and changed their profile names to "Deplorable" in one form or another.  And Facebook just isn't having it.

Google/Facebook Subverting Election for Hillary.  Google/Facebook/Twitter and the mainstream media are using social engineering on you to achieve their political goals.  [Video clip]

Facebook Bans "911 Conspiracy" from Trending Topics.  Facebook says it is working to fight the spread of fake news on its platform after false stories claiming the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy and that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was backing Hillary Clinton appeared among its "trending topics."  The trending section is supposed to include news stories that are popular among users, but the algorithms used to determine their selection have backfired on the company.

How Left-Wing is Facebook.  Facebook came under attack a few months ago for selecting liberal themes and news stories and downplaying conservative ones in its "trending" news section.  Mark Zuckerberg responded by hosting a meeting with influential conservatives in which he was conciliatory and promised to do better.  But my own experience during the past week has caused me to wonder what is going on at Facebook.

'Hide It Hillary' mobile app game banned by Apple; titles like 'Punch Trump' approved.  A new game called "Hide it Hillary" originally was denied access to Apple's App Store because company gatekeepers said it "includes content that could be considered defamatory or mean-spirited."  The same vetting process allowed titles like "Punch Trump," "Slap Donald Trump," and "Smack a Trump" into the marketplace.  The conservative website Heat Street reported Friday that "Hide it Hillary," which is now available on Google Play for Android devices, does not condone violence or even feature the former secretary of state's image.  Instead, users are tasked with putting documents into a "laptop, server, shredder, or closet."  A day after the Heat Street report, the app was available for 99 cents at the iTunes store and had garnered multiple 5-star reviews by Sunday night [9/4/2016].

Facebook fires human editors, algorithm immediately posts fake news.  Earlier this year, Facebook denied criticisms that its Trending feature was surfacing news stories that were biased against conservatives.  But in an abrupt reversal, the company fired all the human editors for Trending on Friday afternoon [8/26/2016], replacing them with an algorithm that promotes stories based entirely on what Facebook users are talking about.  Within 72 hours, according to the Washington Post, the top story on Trending was about how Fox News icon Megyn Kelly was a pro-Clinton "traitor" who had been fired (she wasn't).

DCLeaks Website Down, Twitter Suspended After Releasing Soros Docs.  DCLeaks, a website that releases information on powerful political figures, has had part of its website taken offline after releasing a cache of documents on billionaire donor George Soros.  The @DCLeaks Twitter account has also been suspended from Twitter for reasons unknown.  The website had previously released 2,500 internal Open Society Foundation (OSF) documents in order to "shed light on one of the most influential networks operating worldwide."  OSF is one of Soros' networks of organizations.  The leaked documents had resulted in several damaging reports about the organization.  OSF had previously confirmed that the documents were legitimate.

Facebook, Instagram Delete Accounts for Gun Parts Dealer Without Explanation.  The owner of a Missouri gun parts and accessories retailer said his Facebook and Instagram accounts were deleted without explanation over the last two weeks.  TJ Kirgin, head of Tactical Shit, said the company's Facebook account, with roughly 480,000 fans, was deactivated last week without warning or explanation.  The company's Instagram account, which Kirgin said had 250,000 fans, was then deleted without warning on Wednesday.  The Facebook account has since been restored, but the Instagram account remains deactivated.

Bias alert:  Twitter bans Breitbart bad boy, but not ISIS-linked London loudmouth.  The Twitterverse has more to fear from a gay conservative than a fire-breathing ISIS recruiter if the social media giant's treatment of a pair of prolific and provocative posters is to be squared.  Twitter banned Breitbart tech editor and openly gay conservative Milo Yiannopoulos for life last month after his followers tweeted objectionable comments targeting African-American "Ghostbusters" star Leslie Jones, but a recent case in London's Old Bailey shows Twitter took a hands-off approach to the poisonous posts of Anjem Choudary.

Twitter suspends 235,000 accounts for promoting terrorism, daily suspensions up 80% over last year.  Twitter suspended 235,000 users in the past seven months for tweets promoting or threatening terrorism, the company announced Thursday [8/18/2016].  The social media outlet has booted a total of 360,000 accounts since the middle of 2015 for violating its terrorism policies, Twitter executives said in a blog post.  The suspensions jump in the aftermath of every terrorist attack, according to the company.

And None So Deaf as They Who Will Not Hear.  Barack Obama bids fair to be remembered as the Florence Foster Jenkins of politics. Like that socialite he can't perform his job for beans.  Like that socialite his friends are covering up for him.  According to a Twitter whistleblower the social media giant's CEO ordered the employees to protect Obama from hurtful Tweets.  "According to a former senior Twitter employee, Costolo ordered employees to deploy an algorithm (which was built in-house by feeding it thousands of examples of abuse and harassing tweets) that would filter out abusive language directed at Obama.  Another source said the media partnerships team also manually censored tweets, noting that Twitter's public quality-filtering algorithms were inconsistent.  Two sources told BuzzFeed News that this decision was kept from senior company employees for fear they would object to the decision."

Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google, and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump.  My dad always told me that conservative candidates have to work twice as hard as their liberal opponents to win elections because they're fighting two opponents:  the Democratic Party and the media.  The usual suspects from left-leaning major media outlets like The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and even entertainment networks are doing everything in their power to ensure a Clinton victory.  Look no further than to Wolf Blitzer mincing around and drinking wine at the Democratic convention, celebrating Hillary's nomination.  But the propaganda skewing this election runs much deeper than just the media:  our iPhones, iPads, social media networks, Google and even video games are all in the tank for Hillary Clinton — and it's chilling.

The Revolt of the Media.  [Scroll down]  It turns out that popular opinion is not all that popular with the people in the media. All over, news and opinion sites are clamping down on comments.  They are heavily policed or they are shut down entirely.  Twitter has allowed a band of angry lesbians to take over the moderation duties.  Reddit hired Chinese grifter Ellen Pao to chase off the bad thinkers.  Faceberg, of course, is run by howling lunatics, who ban people for any deviation from the orthodoxy.  The media is slowly shutting down public comment in a rather deliberate effort to shut down dissent.  This started a couple of years ago, but the process has been accelerating.

This is How Facebook 'Accidentally' Blocked DNC Email Leak Scandal.  Once again, the impartiality of Facebook's news feature is being called into question.  This time, the social network claims it "accidentally" obstructed all links to the leaked Democratic National Committee emails published by Wikileaks just ahead of the party's convention. [...] Complaining about Facebook is nothing new, but this episode of newswire censorship amounts to more than ignored demands for a Dislike button.  In May, former employees of the social networking service blew the whistle on how news stories and trends were generated on the platform.  Instead of an unbiased algorithm, human "curators" were revealed to be making decisions on what deserved to be a top headline.

Facebook blocks Michael Savage for posting news on Islamic crime.  Facebook has temporarily blocked talk-radio host Michael Savage from posting stories to his page after he put up a link to a story about a Muslim migrant killing a pregnant woman in Germany.  A message from the social media giant on Savage's page said:  "You recently posted something that violates Facebook policies, so you're temporarily blocked from using this feature."  The message then refers the user to Facebook's "Community Standards" and states the block will be active for 21 hours.

Hillary's Celebrity Twitter Horde Could Reach 646 Million Followers.  Social media, especially Twitter, is playing a large role in the 2016 presidential election.  Though Trump has 2 million more Twitter followers than Clinton, Hollywood celebrities on Twitter have handed Clinton a major advantage.  Nineteen entertainment celebrities, who are among the 100 most-followed accounts on Twitter and collectively have more than 645.9 million followers, openly supported Clinton's bid for president.  None of Twitter's top 100 account holders are wielding their social media influence for Trump.

Apple's App Store Rejects Anti-Hillary Game, Sells Nasty Trump Games.  Charlie Nash at Breitbart reports that after months and months of making a profit at the expense of Republican nominee Donald Trump, Apple is refusing to publish a political satire game about Hillary Clinton's email scandal.

Twitter Shares Drop By 9% As Company Escalates War On Conservative Media.  Twitter shares have dropped by 9% after the release of its quarterly results, which have seen the company's revenue fall well below its expected targets.  The results indicated that the company expects a third quarter revenue of between $590 [million and] 610 million, well below the company's expected revenue target of $678 million.

Conservative Writer Kassy Dillon Suspended From Twitter for Repeating Leslie Jones.  Kassy Dillon, a contributor to Campus Reform and Heat Street and founder of Lone Conservative, was suspended temporarily from Twitter following Tweets made about Leslie Jones.  While Twitter has not yet returned a request for comment, the suspension appears to be related to an experiment in which Dillon repeated Jones' tweets, word for word, in an effort to expose bias.  "The only reason why I tweeted copies of what Leslie said is to show bias," Dillon told Heat Street.  "If this famous actress actress does it, it's okay, but if I do the same thing as a conservative writer, Twitter punishes me for it."

The Blurred Lines Between Social Media and Censorship.  Indiana's governor and D.C.'s transit agency got caught up in controversies after removing comments off their social media accounts. [...] The exact number of comments is unclear because staff in the governor's office deleted some comments, initially defending the action on the basis of the office's policy prohibiting obscenity, vulgarity and personal attacks.  It prompted an apology the next day from the governor.  "On careful review, it appear [sic] that this was not always the case and some comments were being deleted simply because they expressed disagreement with my position," wrote Pence.

Censorship vs.  Activism on Social Media.  Free speech and social networks don't always work together.  User agreements often give social networks the right to pull any content they deem objectionable, and this seems to be the case with the campaign on Tinder.  User agreements don't make the distinction of worthy speech, or legally protected speech; they only serve as a roadmap for acceptable speech on the network.

Social Media Censorship:  Legally Justifiable but Philosophically Poisonous.  This is obviously a policy that is extremely broad and in being so leaves much open to interpretation.  It was likely crafted intentionally in such a fashion so as to give Twitter's management sizable control over the content available.  Yet regardless the moment one downloads Twitter and begins using it they are entering a contract with the company that ensures your right to use it as long as you follow the rules, and if you don't the contract becomes null and void; along with your account.

Should Social Media Censor Content?  Most sites describe their censorship to some degree within the terms of service (TOS) that all users must agree to.  However, the censorship process itself need not be disclosed, and these private entities have the final word when it comes to what users can and cannot post.

Facebook Quickly Admits to Censoring WikiLeaks DNC Links, Doesn't Say Why.  Despite famously swearing that they took a long, hard look at themselves and found no hint of bias, Zuckerberg and Co. still have a hard time hiding their agenda.

Users Accuse Twitter Of Censoring WikiLeaks DNC Emails Leak.  Users have accused Twitter of censoring WikiLeaks' DNC email release after the related trending hashtag was suddenly pulled before returning to the trending list in a modified form.  "#DNCLeaks" was one of the top trending topics on Twitter this Friday with over 250,000 tweets reported to have been made under the hashtag since WikiLeaks released over 19,000 leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Twitter Does Nothing As Breitbart Contributor Is Flooded With Death Threats.  Despite Twitter's insistence that its priority is tackling threats and harassment, not punishing conservatives like Milo Yiannopoulos, the social media company has ignored the calls of two conservative campus activists who have been repeatedly targeted with threats and harassment on the platform for their political views.  The tweets displayed below are only a sampling of the threats sent to conservative campus activists Ariana Rowlands and Kassy Dillon have received.  Although those responsible have been repeatedly reported to Twitter, no action has been taken.

Users Strongly Reject Censorship on Facebook, Twitter.  Political conservatives have charged in recent months that major social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are censoring their points of view.  Regular users of those sites, especially those under the age of 40, strongly disagree with any attempts to close down free speech.

No Action Taken by Twitter After Rapper Calls Black Breitbart Reporter 'Coon'.  Rapper Talib Kweli and some of his more than one million social media followers repeatedly attacked Breitbart News reporter Jerome Hudson with racial epithets on Twitter, but faced no disciplinary action from the platform.

Death Threats Made Towards Republican Senators Remain on Twitter for Weeks Without Deletion.  Numerous death threats made towards Republican Senators on Twitter remained on the platform for weeks before being deleted, despite the platform's consistent record of removing "problematic" opinions within a matter of hours.  Two weeks ago, a user on Twitter threatened to shoot Senator Roy Blunt, claiming that the Missouri congressman was responsible for "allowing someone to murder my loved ones."  The poster, Kyler Schmitz from Virginia, was detained by police after it was ruled that the threat was an illegal violation of interstate communications.  However, his account was only suspended and the tweets deleted once The Hill reached out to Twitter about the threats.

Milo Yiannopolous "Permanently Banned" from Twitter for Calling a Lady Ghostbuster a "Dude".  [Scroll down]  So he got banned for "racism" or something.  How was that racism?  Apparently some of his followers did hector her with more racially edgy stuff — so is that Twitter's policy now?  [T]hat if your followers say something untoward, you get banned?  Why does it seem likely to me this is a special rule meant only for conservatives?  I should note the obvious here:  This isn't just about anti-conservative bias (though it is that, obviously).  It's also about Twitter's entire business model.

Beware of Twitter Robots Telling People How to Vote.  Voting is partially a social endeavor, in which people consider the opinions of others when making up their own minds.  Increasingly, though, they're being influenced by an inhuman force: software robots specifically designed to deceive them.  Lest democracy be undermined, humans need help in distinguishing their brethren from the bots.  Two years ago, in a report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the social networking site Twitter estimated that more than 23 million of its active user accounts were being run by "bots" — software agents or bits of code that act on their own to respond to news and world events.  They interact with real users, never revealing their true nature.

Twitter Makes it Clear to Teen:  "Thou Shall Not Criticize Ghostbusters".  There's a new development in the aftermath of the Leslie Jones meltdown.  One of the first people to be banned, even before Milo, was a 17-year-old high school girl with a deep passion for politics.

Milo Suspended Permanently by Twitter Minutes Before 'Gays For Trump' Party At RNC.  Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos has been suspended from Twitter once more just 20 minutes before his "Gays for Trump" event takes place at the Republican National Convention.  The justification for the suspension is currently unknown, although it could be as a result of Milo's run-in with Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones on the site. [...] In a comment, Milo said "With the cowardly suspension of my account, Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives."

France Terrorist Posted 'kill. kill. kill.' on Facebook; Motive for Attack Remains a Mystery.  That part about it being a mystery is what we surmise they're saying in the White House today.  The rest of the planet outside the dopey left and the media (redundancy) know what the deal is.

Pamela Geller Suing Facebook Over Censorship.  Tired of having your content censored by Facebook?  Pamela Geller is, and is suing Facebook over their censorship.  Good for her!

Facebook Sued for $1b for Alleged Use of Medium for Terror.  Lawyers filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Facebook Inc., alleging it allowed the Palestinian militant Hamas group to use the platform to plot attacks that killed four Americans and wounded one in Israel, the West Bank and Jerusalem.  "Facebook has knowingly provided material support and resources to Hamas in the form of Facebook's online social network platform and communication services," making it liable for the violence against the five Americans, according to the lawsuit sent to Bloomberg by the office of the Israeli lawyer on the case, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.  "Simply put, Hamas uses Facebook as a tool for engaging in terrorism," it said.

Facebook Says Its Integrity Depends on Being 'a Platform for All Ideas'.  Facebook is sharing publicly for the first time the core values that guide its news feed — the main source of news and information from your friends, family, and publications like The Daily Signal.  The decision to disclose more information about the news feed comes a month after the social media giant faced accusations of anti-conservative bias.  Conservatives who attended a meeting with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Menlo Park, California, on May 18 asked the company to be more transparent about how it operates.  Today's announcement is the latest step.

Facebook scores hits, misses as it reaches out to right after bias accusations.  Facebook's reboot with the right was firing on all cylinders last week as Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg met with conservatives in Washington, D.C., and announced a program to manage employee political bias.  And then she publicly endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president.  Still, Ms. Sandberg did enough during her two-day charm offensive to reinforce hopes that Facebook's efforts to address its widely alleged anti-conservative tilt represent more than lip service.

Facebook is keeping its employees' politics in check with bias training.  Facebook is training its top leaders and employees on how to manage their political bias, according to the social network's COO Sheryl Sandberg.  The revelation comes less than two months after Facebook's trending topics controversy, which saw the company fending off accusations of human bias affecting its news algorithm.  In a discussion with Arthur Brooks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Wednesday [6/22/2016], Sandberg stated:  "We have a managing bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create.  And we focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we're going to add in a scenario now on political bias."

I suspect they are already familiar with bias, and see nothing wrong with it.
Facebook to Provide 'Political Bias' Training for Employees.  Facebook is adding a training program for its employees to address concerns that the company has a bias against conservatives.  Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, announced the addition of a "political bias" section to the company's managing unconscious bias class during a Wednesday event at the American Enterprise Institute.  "We have a managing bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create.  And we focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we're going to add in a scenario now on political bias," Sandberg said.

Texas fisherman:  Facebook removed photo of huge hammerhead shark for violating site rules.  Corpus Christi fisherman Eric Ozolins posted some amazing photos last weekend of a giant hammerhead shark he caught on Facebook, but the social media site reportedly removed the photos Wednesday for violating terms and policy.  "Facebook had removed my recent post and hammerhead photos due to going against 'terms and policy'."  Ozolins said on Facebook.  "Wow.  There was not a single thing against any terms etc.  Not that I am worried about it, I'm just amazed (or rather appalled) by how they can gain influence from uneducated tree-huggers and break their own rules to remove something rather innocent despite all the other horrendous stuff they fail to remove on their actual system."

In Aftermath of Orlando, Facebook Bans Gay Magazine on Behalf of Islam.  Who is higher up in the P.C. caste system, Muslims or gays?  In the aftermath of the Islamic slaughter of 49 gays in Orlando, Facebook gives the answer:  ["]Facebook has banned the page of gay magazine Gaystream after they published an article critical of Islam in the wake of the Orlando massacre.["]

Pamela Geller And 'Stop Islamization Of America' Reinstated On Facebook Following Breitbart Story.  Despite initially saying they would suspend her for 30 days, Facebook has restored the account of Islam critic Pamela Geller and her group, "Stop Islamization Of America" following multiple stories from Breitbart Tech and across the media drawing attention to the social network's double standards and history of liberal bias.  Facebook's clampdown on the prominent critic of Islam, who has faced death threats from ISIS over her outspoken criticism of the religion, began shortly after the murderous Islamic terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida over the weekend.

Facebook Bans Gay Magazine Critical Of Islam.  Facebook has banned the page of gay magazine Gaystream after they published an article critical of Islam in the wake of the Orlando massacre.  The social media platform has again been censoring pages that criticise Islam.  Facebook banned the page of gay magazine Gaystream after the publication wrote an article attacking people for defending the attitudes of the religion towards homosexuals.

Reddit Will Adjust Algorithm To Censor Trump Supporters Following Orlando Shootings.  Reddit has announced a change to its algorithm on /r/all, the page that is meant to rank the most popular posts trending across the site's user-run communities.  According to Reddit, the algorithm will be changed to promote more "diversity" on the subreddit. [...] /r/all collects and ranks posts on Reddit according to how many "upvotes" they receive from users.  A post typically requires several thousand upvotes to reach the front page of the site.

Media Ignoring a MAJOR Part of the Facebook Scandal.  The liberal media are all over one part of the Facebook scandal story — and ignoring another.  Generally, media have covered the accusations that the social media site is censoring conservative news and sources from their trending news feed.  Coincidentally, this is also the part of the Facebook story affecting the media.  Potentially a bigger scandal (because it affects more people) is the accusation that Facebook censors individual member pages, blogs, smaller media outlets, and discussion groups reflecting a conservative point of view.  Sometimes, the sites are shut down, sometimes they are simply threatened into silence.

Former Facebook Insider:  We Buried Conservative News.  In an interview with Gizmodo published Monday morning [5/9/2016], [a] former journalist said that stories about CPAC, Mitt Romney and Rand Paul, among other topics, were not allowed to "trend" on Facebook, despite the fact that these stories met all the criteria for a story to be listed as highly influential.  In fact, not only did news curators apparently block conservative news sites, they also regularly boosted unpopular stories into the trending news feed, so as to push a narrative.  This practice occurs even though Facebook maintains it only curates stories that become popular on their own.

Former Facebook Employees Claim Website Snuffed Conservative News.  Former Facebook employees have told Gizmodo that the company regularly told them to stamp out conservative news even if it trended on the website. [...] "Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending," stated the former employee, who identifies as a conservative.  "I'd come on shift and I'd discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn't be trending because either the curator didn't recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz."

Censoring the news isn't Facebook's only threat to democracy.  To recap:  After interviewing several former so-called "news curators," responsible for Facebook's trending news section, Gizmodo says that the social-media platform decided to ignore some stories about conservative topics that had actually generated a lot of discussion among users.  One curator kept a list:  Omitted stories, he said, included CPAC, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and, in a weirdly ironic twist, bias by the Internal Revenue Service against conservative groups.  Some curators reportedly considered conservative media outlets insufficiently credible, including their news only after more left-leaning or centrist publications also picked up the story.

The RNC Pounces, Rails Against Facebook for 'Conservative Censorship'.  The RNC was quick to pounce tonight on the report about Facebook suppressing conservative news with their own hashtag: #MakeThisTrend.  Former Facebook employees claimed that news favorable to conservatives was left out of the Trending News section.  Facebook has denied this, but the report has already sparked a great deal of outrage online.

Conservatives Blind to Racism, says RedState Seer.  Over the weekend in Indianapolis, the video of a group of black people stalking, taunting, and beating a white girl and her four-year old brother went viral.  Facebook found it so objectionable it declared the video "violated its terms of service," removed it, and threatened to shut down your humble correspondent's Facebook page if I ever posted something like that again.  They even removed the comments that said the black on white violence is justified because white people deserve it.  Here's the offending video.  Attack in Indianapolis.  Facebook and YouTube often take down other videos of black on white racial violence as well.

Group develops software to block terrorists online.  A nonprofit dedicated to combatting terrorist propaganda on Friday [6/17/2016] said it has new technology that can help social media companies better identify the type of posts and videos that investigators believe helped drive Omar Mateen to shoot 102 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., on Sunday.  The Counter Extremism Project, which was founded by a group of former world leaders and diplomats, has taken Twitter, Facebook and Google to task for not doing enough to prevent groups such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State from exploiting their platforms to recruit adherents, incite lone-wolf attacks, raise money and distribute their barbaric videos.

It begins:  Facebook deletes page of critic of Muslim migrant invasion.  Yesterday I wrote that the new initiative of Twitter and Facebook to eliminate so-called "hate speech" would be directed not at jihad terrorists, or at least not solely, but also at foes of jihad terror and related issues.  Now it begins.  This kind of action is the death knell of free society.

What viewer discretion?  YouTube bans video exposing Muslim Brotherhood.  We've reached a point in western civilization where it is more offensive to expose Islamic terrorists than engage in Islamic terrorism itself.  Our enemies understand this phenomenon, which is why they have so successfully exploited "liberal" western values against America and Europe.  In the words of the Muslim Brotherhood's explanatory memorandum, "destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands."  The latest example of the West's instant capitulation and adherence to Sharia is YouTube's decision to ban a video produced by Counter Jihad, which exposes the stealth jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America and sharia law as the source of the problem.  The video is a simple 3-minute explanatory of the root cause of today's jihad — the strict dictates of sharia to wage war against the West.

Wikipedia and the Climate Non-Debate.  Wikipedia, known as the "people's encyclopedia," has proven to be anything but a reliable source in regards to the debate concerning the causes and possible consequences of climate change.  Wikipedia is written and edited "by the people who read it," and it receives more than 400 million unique visitors every month worldwide, according to GuideStar.  The massive website has about 80,000 volunteers, a substantial number of whom are devoted enough to earn the unpaid rank of "editor."  Editors are provided with a fat book of rules to follow and a code of civility to honor.  Wikipedia has emerged as an influential tool used by climate alarmists against climate change realists, who are unwilling to accept political proclamations that humans are causing catastrophic climate change.  Dogmatic climate doomsters ignore Wikipedia's rules and spend days plowing through reams of Wikipedia pages to track down and purge or alter any entry daring to challenge the view humans are responsible for global warming.

Down the Memory Hole.  George Orwell warned us, in his 1949 novel titled 1984, of how totalitarian regimes could exercise control over their citizens by making news of past events and articles about forbidden ideas disappear "down the memory hole."  The Party's Ministry of Truth would frequently edit, revise, or simply destroy documents that contradicted its propaganda.  The Internet makes it easier for governments and their allies to do this.  The results of Google searches increasingly show evidence of bias and behind-the-scenes manipulation.  Websites and articles expressing conservative and libertarian ideas appear only after page after page of politically correct sites and blogposts, making them unlikely to be seen by all but the most determined searcher.  Facebook and even Twitter appear to be succumbing to the same pressure to conform to the political creed of the current occupant of the White House.  Digital documents are easily edited or deleted.  Probably the most tragic example of this is Wikipedia, the self-described "people's encyclopedia."  Thousands of its entries — particularly profiles of organizations and individuals and articles about climate change — have been rewritten to reflect a pervasive left-wing bias.

The Hate Speech Patrol

Facebook flags Declaration of Independence as hate speech.  In the week of America's Independence Day, the algorithms of Facebook decided that the Declaration of Independence was hate speech.  The Liberty County Vindicator, a community newspaper between Houston and Beaumont, had been posting the whole declaration in small daily chunks for eight days on its Facebook page in the run-up to July 4.  But the ninth excerpt was not posted Monday [7/2/2018] as scheduled, and the paper said it received an automated notice saying the post "goes against our standards on hate speech."

Facebook Removes Declaration of Independence Excerpt for 'Hate Speech'.  Facebook removed an excerpt from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, claiming the text violated the social network's policies on "hate speech."  The Liberty County Vindicator had been uploading the Declaration of Independence in parts to their Facebook page, only for the tenth part to be removed by the social network.

Facebook Apologizes For Flagging Declaration of Independence as Hate Speech — Blames Al Gorithm.  This Al Gorithm guy should be fired, no?  He's blamed for every totalitarian hammer the right gets on everything from Twitter to Facebook.

Facebook Apologizes for Censoring Declaration of Independence as 'Hate Speech'.  Facebook has apologized to a Texas newspaper after flagging a post containing text from the Declaration of Independence as "hate speech." [...] Casey Stinnett, managing editor of the Liberty County Vindicator, suspects the term "Indian Savages" might have triggered Facebook's "filtering program."  He said the censorship was an "automated action."

Bosch Fawstin vs. Facebook and The Religion of "Peace".  Part of growing into adulthood from infantile immaturity is accepting what you cannot control.  Of all the things we cannot control, the minds, thoughts and feelings of others are the least under our control.  Sure, we can persuade people when they wish to hear from us, and when or if they're open to persuasion.  But one basic foundation of emotional health and maturity is an acceptance that others will think or feel whatever they wish to think or feel — and you have to get over it.  For whatever reasons, in today's society this is no longer the standard — at least not with certain groups or belief systems.

How will Facebook, Google and Twitter define the "Hate" they plan to censor?  [Scroll down]  What is "hate," as defined by leftists, the very community from which these curators hail?  The Southern Poverty Law Center is a prominent radical leftist group hell-bent on poisoning society against conservatives, especially the social kind.  It features a "Hate Map" with the locations of conservative organizations of all stripes.  The Family Research Center, The Center for Security Policy, the Center for Family and Human Rights, ACT for America and the Traditional Values Coalition — these are but a few.  And what views do these "haters" hold?  Some support traditional marriage, some stopping illegal immigration, some fighting radical Islam.  A writer for the leftist website Salon has his example of hatred — the Confederate flag, which he calls "the American swastika."

Twitter and Facebook Vow to Eliminate 'Hate Speech'.  Vera Jourova, whom AP identifies as "the EU commissioner responsible for justice, consumers and gender equality," explained:  "The internet is a place for free speech, not hate speech."  She added that the new rules would "ensure that public incitement to violence to hatred has 'no place online.'"  But incitement to violence isn't all that the social media giants are planning to stamp out:  Karen White, Twitter's European head of public policy, declared:  "We remain committed to letting the Tweets flow.  However, there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate."  The problem with both Jourova's and White's statements is that they assume that "hate speech" is an entity that can be identified objectively, when actually it is a subjective judgment based on one's own political preconceptions.  And given the years-long insistence from Leftists and Islamic supremacists that any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism constitutes "hate speech," these new rules could mean the end of opposition to jihad terror on the Internet.

Turkish Man Held in Preventive Detention for Insulting Erdogan on Facebook.  A Turkish court ordered preventive detention for a 17-year-old young man for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his Facebook account, Dogan news agency reported on Monday [12/28/2015].  After the Turkish authorities checked the account's content, the teenager was arrested by the police and taken to court, which issued its decision.  The Turkish criminal code stipulates sentences of between one and four years in prison for insulting the president.

On the other hand, stuff like this is okay:

Facebook Says 'Death To Jews' Group Falls Within Community Standards.  Social networking website Facebook has stated that a group created by anti-Semitic users entitled, "Death to zionst [sic] baby killer israeli jews" falls within its Community Standards guidelines, despite inciting hatred and violence against a particular race.  Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner originally reported the news, stating:  "A Facebook page calling for the death of Israeli Jews does not violate the social network's "community standards," according to multiple messages sent by Facebook in response to user complaints."

Facebook Fatwa on Rifqa.  Facebook is full of death threats and other vicious material about Rifqa Bary, the teenage convert from Islam to Christianity who is in a fight for her life in juvenile court on Franklin County, Ohio.  She left Islam and converted to Christianity, and she has been persecuted for it ever since.

When the First Amendment and terror collide.  Nohemi Gonzalez, an ambitious 23-year-old student of fashion and design at California State University, Long Beach, was eating at a restaurant on the Rue de Charrone during her fall semester in Paris when gunmen attacked and murdered her.  She was the only known American among the 129 people who were killed in the Nov. 13, 2015, Paris terror attacks.  Last week Nohemi's father, Reynaldo Gonzalez, filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California against Twitter, Facebook and Google, alleging that they are liable for his daughter's death because they "knowingly permitted the terrorist group ISIS to use their social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda."  The suit calls this "material support" for terrorism, saying that without social media, the growth of ISIS "would not have been possible."

7 Reasons You Should Quit Facebook.  [#1] It Wastes Your Time.  It's estimated that the average casual user (17 minutes per day on Facebook) who has been active on the site for 10 years has wasted upwards of 40 entire days of their lives scrolling and liking and commenting on pictures and posts.  And more engaged users, who spend at least an hour a day on the site, have clocked 150 days feeding the Facebook beast during the same time.  Think about how long you spend on the site each day, and what else could be a more productive use of your time.

Facebook admits rogue employees may have shown bias against conservatives.  Facebook announced Monday [5/23/2016] it was sending employees out for retraining and would discontinue some of its practices as it sought to defend itself against charges of political bias against conservatives.  The online giant denied that it's shown "systematic political bias," but admitted employees played a bigger role than previously acknowledged in determining what news is highlighted in the trending topics section.  Facebook also acknowledged that rogue employees may have unintentionally discriminated against conservative stories or even acted with malice in "isolated improper actions."

Glenn Beck:  Fooled by Facebook?  I'll get right to the point.  Fraudbook employs a group of young journalists, known as "news curators," who are empowered to manage the algorithmic results and "refine" what qualifies for the site's "Trending Topics" section.  As company vice president of search Tom Stocky put it, the curators "audit topics surfaced algorithmically:  reviewers are required to accept topics that reflect real world events, and are instructed to disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources."  So already evident is a Fraudbook deception:  the Trending Topics section is supposed to reflect "popularity," not politically correctness.  Who decides what constitute "real world events"?  What is a "junk" topic and who defines such?

Facebook Concludes Internal Investigation, Declares Itself Not Guilty!  The findings have been released in a letter to Senator John Thune, who earlier this month called the social network to account for allegations that it artificially suppresses conservative topics on its "Trending News" feed, and artificially promoted progressives ones.  In the letter, which can be read in full [elsew]here, Facebook reiterated their long-standing claim that there is no bias in the way they select Trending Topics.

Perino: Facebook recognizes its 'trust problem' with conservatives.  Dana Perino, co-host of Fox News Channel's "The Five," says that Facebook recognizes that it has a 'trust problem' with conservatives following her meeting Wednesday with the social network's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.  Perino, former White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, was among a group of leading conservatives invited to the meeting at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., following a Gizmodo report that stories about conservative topics were prevented from appearing in Facebook's trending module.  "FOX & Friends Weekend" co-host and Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson also attended the meeting.

Facebook's Troubling One-Way Mirror.  Facebook says it will not share your identity with advertisers without your permission.  And you can set limits on what they can know.  But at the heart of the relationship is a level of trust and a waiving of privacy that Facebook requires from its users as it pursues its mission to "make the world more open and connected."  But how open is Facebook willing to be in return?  The way it initially handled this month's flare-up over accusations of political bias in its Trending Topics feed can only lead to this answer:  not very.

Mark Zuckerberg Still Denies Suppressing Content After Hosting Conservatives at Facebook.  Mark Zuckerberg has released a statement following his widely-publicized meeting with conservative figures at the company's headquarters earlier today [5/18/2016].  The Facebook CEO acknowledged the predominance of conservatives on his platform, noting that Donald Trump has "more fans on Facebook than any other presidential candidate" and that Fox News "drives more interactions on its Facebook page than any other news outlet in the world."

Zuckerberg's Conservative Battle:  Where There's Smoke, There's Fire.  Mark Zuckerberg and his massive social-media site Facebook have come under strong criticism for allegedly suppressing stories of interest for conservative readers from its influential "trending" news section.  Facebook has roughly 1.6 billion users worldwide, 167 million of whom are in the United States.  Its "trending" section is therefore a powerful political influence.  Zuckerberg has denied the charges, and he will meet Wednesday with a handful of conservatives to discuss allegations that Facebook's "news curators" have manipulated its list of stories.  The way it works at Facebook is that this powerful group of curators, or editors, who have access to a ranked list of trending topics generated by the company's algorithms, control the content of the trending-news section.  In effect, these curators exercise gatekeeping powers, which amount to political news-making powers that are transmitted to Facebook's massive audience.

How Facebook Warps Our Worlds.  Those who've been raising alarms about Facebook are right:  Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we're pointed toward foregone conclusions.  We're pressured to conform.  But unseen puppet masters on Mark Zuckerberg's payroll aren't to blame.  We're the real culprits.  When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.

How Facebook Became The Old Media, Only Worse.  A report on the inner workings of Facebook's "Trending Topics" headlines exposes how Facebook contractors routinely manipulated the news feed to exclude topics and news sources of interest to people on the right. [...] The giveaway, really, is that the people who manage Trending Topics call themselves "news curators."  Whenever you see the word "curator" or "curate" outside of an actual museum, it means paternalistically chosen based on some hipster recent college grad's notion of what's good for you.  Facebook is a private company and has a right to do what it wants with its news feed.  But this is still big news, for three reasons. [...]

Former Facebook Insider:  We Buried Conservative News.  In an interview with Gizmodo published Monday morning [5/9/2016], [a] former journalist said that stories about CPAC, Mitt Romney and Rand Paul, among other topics, were not allowed to "trend" on Facebook, despite the fact that these stories met all the criteria for a story to be listed as highly influential.  In fact, not only did news curators apparently block conservative news sites, they also regularly boosted unpopular stories into the trending news feed, so as to push a narrative.  This practice occurs even though Facebook maintains it only curates stories that become popular on their own.

Meet The New Media, Same As The Old Media.  While the Washington Post is known as a liberal newspaper, many people were shocked this week to learn that Facebook, the social media giant, is also staunchly liberal.  Thanks to an expose by Gizmodo, Facebook's internal operations involving trending news stories were revealed.  Former news "curators" reported that Facebook suppresses conservative news reports, while promoting stories involving radical leftists.  This has a major influence on younger voters, who tend to learn about news stories from Facebook and other social media sites.  After this story broke, the founder and CEO of Facebook, Marc Zuckerberg, defended his website and refuted the allegations.  In a personal post, Zuckerberg claimed that there was "no evidence that this report is true."  However, frequent Facebook users can attest that the report of liberal bias is unquestionably true.

My conservative page got blocked by Facebook.  [Scroll down]  And a few hours after banning me, Facebook had a change of heart.  "A member of our team accidentally removed something you posted on Facebook," they told me in an email.  "This was a mistake and we sincerely apologize for this error."  Since that fateful day, I've noticed that my page has been subjected to random censorship by the Facebook gods.  I've received dozens of complaints from readers who tell me my content no longer appears on their pages.  In some cases, Facebook won't allow them to share my postings.  And I've lost count of the number of fellow conservative writers whose pages have been blocked, banned or censored.

5 Huge Stories the Media Ignored While Arguing Over Which Bathroom to Use.  [#3] Last week, Gizmodo published an in-depth story detailing how journalists working for the "Facebook Trends" feature of the social networking site were mistreated and quarantined from the rest of the staff.  This week, Gizmodo published a follow-up piece documenting allegations from former employees that curators of the trending section excluded stories from conservative outlets and deliberately failed to include conservative topics from the IRS discrimination scandal to Rand Paul.  Though these exclusions appeared to be unintentional displays of bias from individual employees, they dominated coverage of the story.  But other manipulations of the feed were more deliberate.

Facebook — More Dangerous than the NSA.  A while back, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on our National Security Agency.  They're spying on all our digital devices, have been for years.  Our privacy has vanished. [...] But if you're looking for something to really worry about, how about an equally large computer-based organization with the genuine power to invade our privacy, warp our minds and distort our culture that is actually in the process of doing it — Facebook?  In a media world where print journalism is disappearing and young (and many older) people gather the vast percentage of their information online, its dominance is overwhelming and its effect pernicious, maybe poisonous.

'Fakebook' ups Friend Requests to conservative sites they suppress.  [Scroll down]  Then came word in a stunning Gizmodo exposé that there is no algorithm determining which stories on the Internet are the most popular only "a bunch of young, average liberals actually choosing the news". [...] Since no algorithms but staff choosing what news will go viral on Fakebook, the social media giant has been bending itself into pretzels with the "none of this is true" alibi.

Media Ignoring a MAJOR Part of the Facebook Scandal.  The liberal media are all over one part of the Facebook scandal story — and ignoring another.  Generally, media have covered the accusations that the social media site is censoring conservative news and sources from their trending news feed.  Coincidentally, this is also the part of the Facebook story affecting the media.  Potentially a bigger scandal (because it affects more people) is the accusation that Facebook censors individual member pages, blogs, smaller media outlets, and discussion groups reflecting a conservative point of view.  Sometimes, the sites are shut down, sometimes they are simply threatened into silence.

Censoring the news isn't Facebook's only threat to democracy.  To recap:  After interviewing several former so-called "news curators," responsible for Facebook's trending news section, Gizmodo says that the social-media platform decided to ignore some stories about conservative topics that had actually generated a lot of discussion among users.  One curator kept a list:  Omitted stories, he said, included CPAC, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and, in a weirdly ironic twist, bias by the Internal Revenue Service against conservative groups.  Some curators reportedly considered conservative media outlets insufficiently credible, including their news only after more left-leaning or centrist publications also picked up the story.

Former Facebook Employees Claim Website Snuffed Conservative News.  Former Facebook employees have told Gizmodo that the company regularly told them to stamp out conservative news even if it trended on the website. [...] "Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending," stated the former employee, who identifies as a conservative.  "I'd come on shift and I'd discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn't be trending because either the curator didn't recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz."

Top Republican demands answers over alleged Facebook political bias.  A top Republican senator on Tuesday demanded answers from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over allegations that the social media giant's trending news feature omits topics popular with conservatives.  "Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news," said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) in a statement.  "Any attempt by a neutral and inclusive social media platform to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open Internet."

The Editor says...
True, but only if Facebook makes claims to be a news medium rather than an enhanced chat room.  (And perhaps that is the case.  I wouldn't know -- I've never been on Facebook.)  Otherwise, Facebook is a private company that is free to pass or block anything on its web site.

The Senate Has No Business Investigating Facebook.  If you're put off by freedom-hating Attorneys General trying to shut down speech, or the Democratic Party's crusade to inhibit political expression by overturning Citizens United, or you thought the Fairness Doctrine was basically censorship, I'm not sure how you rationalize supporting the GOP Senate's investigation into the conduct of Facebook.  Though in this case, many liberals will argue that corporations deserve the same constitutional protections as regular people, but it's been the Left that wanted to give government the power to dictate what kind of cakes Americans bake, who they have to let into their bathrooms, what ingredients they must not put in their food and whose contraception they must buy.  Conservatives have, in the past few years, avoided such intrusions.  Now they want to get involved in demanding private companies adhere to speech codes?

Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show.  Leaked documents show how Facebook, now the biggest news distributor on the planet, relies on old-fashioned news values on top of its algorithms to determine what the hottest stories will be for the 1 billion people who visit the social network every day.  The documents, given to the Guardian, come amid growing concerns over how Facebook decides what is news for its users.  This week the company was accused of an editorial bias against conservative news organizations, prompting calls for a congressional inquiry from the US Senate commerce committee chair, John Thune.

Facebook's Trending Topics Executive Is A Big Hillary Clinton Donor.  The Facebook executive who oversees the Trending Topics product for the social media giant is a big Hillary Clinton donor, public records show. [...] Facebook claims it has "rigorous guidelines" to prevent political bias from corrupting its news aggregation service, but Tom Stocky, the Facebook executive in charge of the Trending Topics product, has a long history of progressive political activism.  In October of 2015, for example, Stocky and his wife, a Google executive, donated $5,400 to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics:

Facebook exec: 'No evidence' to support political bias allegations.  A Facebook executive said early Tuesday morning that the company had found "no evidence" to support allegations that conservative subjects had been kept out of its "Trending" section.  "We take these reports extremely seriously, and have found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true," said Tom Stocky, the company' vice president for search, in a post on Facebook.

Is Facebook Censoring Conservative News?  How Social Media Controls What We See.  Gizmodo's Michael Nunez is out today with a sensational story in which former Facebook employees claim they regularly censored the platform's "trending" news section to eliminate stories about conservative topics that were organically trending, blacklisted certain news outlets from appearing and artificially "injected" stories they felt were important but that the site's users were not discussing or clicking on. [...] In short, as the curtain has been lifted on Facebook's magical trending algorithm, the mythical unbiased algorithm powering what users see on the site is seen to be less machine and more biased human curator.  Yet, given Facebook's phenomenal reach across the world and the role it increasingly plays as primary news gateway for more and more people, the notion that it is systematically curating what its users see in an unalgorithmic and partisan way raises alarm bells on the future of how we access and consume information.

Facebook Is Censoring Conservative News And Opinion.  Facebook has often been accused of being liberal and censoring conservative news and commentary, but now people are offering proof that those accusations may, indeed, be true.  The social media site is censoring conservative news and opinion on both their news feed and posts on individual member pages.  Gizmodo, a major tech blog, interviewed some of the former editors for Facebook's news aggregation service (Facebook calls them "news curators"). While technically not Facebook employees, these curators have "the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to."  They contend the selection of stories and sources for Facebook is automated but, based on the directions they received, some sources and topics are "blacklisted" to avoid exposing readers to conservative points of view.

Somewhat related:

A blogger was dragged off to a mental ward because of his Facebook posts.  Exactly what you'd expect in North Korea, China, or Cuba.
'Outraged' judge frees veteran Raub from Virginia psych ward.  [Scroll down]  His saga began Aug. 16.  That's when [Brandon] Raub was taken into custody at his Richmond home by FBI and Secret Service agents and Chesterfield County Police.  He was not charged with a crime, yet he was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police vehicle.  From there, Mr. Raub was taken to a police station and then to the John Randolph Medical Facility in Hopewell, Va., for a psychiatric evaluation.  He was never formally arrested or charged with a crime, Mr. Whitehead said.  "He was in his underwear, in his living room, he sees a group of police, FBI agents walking up, he talks with them, he's asked about some Facebook postings, they handcuff him," Mr. Whitehead said.

There is more about Brandon Raub on this page.

Ohio Cops Think This Guy Should Go to Jail for Making Fun of Them.  Anthony Novak's parody of the Parma Police Department's Facebook page included what the Cleveland Plain Dealer describes as "obviously fake news posts," but this is not one of them:  The Parma Police Department wants to charge the 27-year-old with a felony for creating the page.  The felony, disrupting public services, is punishable by up to 18 months in prison — a pretty steep penalty for irking local police officials.  "We believe the material that Novak posted on the fake account crossed the line from satire to an actual risk to public safety," Lt. Kevin Riley told The Plain Dealer.  "We presented the facts of this case and the investigation to our law department, and they agreed that Novak's actions were criminal in nature."  It is hard to see how.  Novak's page is no longer online, but there is nothing in The Plain Dealer's description of of it that sounds like a crime.

This is a lot like the zero-tolerance nonsense in the public schools.
Eagle-Eyed Detective Thwarts Inmate's Theft Of Jail Spork Valued At Two Cents.  After completing a jail sentence, a Florida woman left the Manatee County lockup last month with a smuggled memento of her time behind bars.  In a Facebook post, the woman wrote, "just a pic of a souvenir I picked up on my 6 month vacation."  Next to that caption was a photo of a spork, the spoon/fork hybrid used by inmates during jail meals.  In a subsequent message, the inmate noted that, "it wasn't easy to get out with me... that's for sure!!!"  What the inmate, whose last name is Jones, did not anticipate was that her Facebook page was being monitored by Detective Todd Zink of the Manatee County Sheriff's Office.

Woman issued citation by authorities for Facebook comment.  Christine Adamski said she was surprised last week when she received a citation in the mail for a comment she made on Facebook, but she also knew immediately she wasn't going to pay it.  Adamski, 25, opened the $50 ticket from the Will County Forest Preserve District last week and read the letter alleging she had used a dog park without a proper permit.  The citation arrived at her Bolingbrook home with a letter explaining the ticket, an application for a dog park permit as well as a copy of her social media post "admitting her guilt."  "I laughed," Adamski said Thursday.  "I was like, this is totally untrue.  Obviously I'm not going to pay this."

Facebook Monitors Your Private Messages and Photos For Criminal Activity, Reports them to Police.  Facebook has a new little known software that monitors your profile chat and pictures for criminal activity.  The software will proceed to alert an employee at the company who will then decide whether to call authorities or not.  The software will monitor individuals who have a 'loose' relationship on social media networks, according to an interview with Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan.

When Cops Check Facebook.  For the past several years, police and prosecutors across the country have been quietly using social media to track criminal networks.  Their methods have become more sophisticated:  by combining social media APIs, databases, and network analysis tools, police can keep tabs on gang activity.  In New York's Harlem neighborhood, at-risk teens are identified as members of gangs based on their affiliations and are monitored on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The Department of Homeland Security Is Searching Your Facebook and Twitter for These Words.  The Department of Homeland Security monitors your updates on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, to uncover "Items Of Interest" (IOI), according to an internal DHS document released by the EPIC.  That document happens to include a list of the baseline terms for which the DHS — or more specifically, a DHS subcontractor hired to monitor social networks — use to generate real-time IOI reports.

That's what Carnivore was all about.

List reveals keywords feds monitor on Facebook, Twitter.  Have you ever wondered if the government — or more specifically, the Department of Homeland Security — is monitoring your Twitter or Facebook posts?  If the answer's "yes," give yourself a pat on the back because you're right and not simply paranoid.  There's even a list of keywords for which subcontractors hired by the DHS check social networks.

Government Set Up A Fake Facebook Page In This Woman's Name.  The Justice Department is claiming, in a little-noticed court filing, that a federal agent had the right to impersonate a young woman online by creating a Facebook page in her name without her knowledge.  Government lawyers also are defending the agent's right to scour the woman's seized cell phone and to post photographs — including racy pictures of her and even one of her young son and niece — to the phony social media account, which the agent was using to communicate with suspected criminals.

Somewhat related:
Navy veteran fired for posting Homeland Security vehicles on Facebook.  A Facebooking employee of Chesterfield's Drury Plaza Hotel is out of a job after curiosity over dozens of Homeland Security vehicles in the hotel garage got the best of him.  His photos on social media got him fired.  Mark Paffrath saw the collection of vehicles last Thursday [11/13/2014], and it certainly got his attention.  "It was very odd that there was a bunch of Homeland Security cars there and I was shocked and took a picture and a short video and posted them to Facebook with the status update, 'What are these vehicles doing here?  I wonder if it has anything to do with Ferguson?'"

Man Who Leaked DHS Pictures Branded a Terrorist: "You Will Be Incarcerated".  Did you know that taking pictures of Department of Homeland Security vehicles and posting them on the internet could land you on a terrorist watch list, or even in prison?  Navy Veteran Mark Paffrath, who recently took pictures of DHS vehicles parked in full public view at the Drury Plaza Hotel in Missouri has been terminated from his job, threatened with imprisonment and branded a terrorist.  Paffrath was on his way to work when he saw the vehicles and decided to snap some photos and a video.

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