Bias and Censorship in Social Media

Bias and Censorship in Social Media

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.

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."

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

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. [...]

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.

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. Words like Cyber Command, 2600, spammer, phishing, rootkit, phreaking, dransp, dirty bomb, enriched, nuclear, chemical weapon, biological weapon, ammonium nitrate

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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