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Facebook, Twitter Censor President Trump’s Fox News Interview

Facebook and Twitter censored a video clip of President Donald Trump’s recent interview on Fox News’ Fox & Friends over alleged coronavirus “misinformation.” Facebook said it removed the video of the interview because President Trump claimed that children have heightened immunity to coronavirus. The Trump campaign stands by this claim, but Facebook disagrees, and used it as an excuse to prevent American citizens using the platform from hearing what their president has to say. This is despite repeated assurances from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the platform will not censor politicians. In a speech at Georgetown University in October 2019, Zcukberg said “we think people should be able to hear what politicians have to say.” It seems policy has now changed at Facebook, which is now censoring what the President is saying. “This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from Covid-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful Covid misinformation,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone in a statement attempting to justify the takedown. Twitter quickly followed Facebook’s lead, taking down the video, which had been posted by an official Trump campaign account, shortly after Facebook took action. In a statement, Courtney Parella slammed Facebook for its censorship of the President. “Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth, said Parella. According to Parella, Trump was “stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus.” Using the Chinese virus as a justification, social media platforms have over the past few months taken unprecedented steps to censor the President, his supporters, and conservative media. Last week, Facebook censored a viral video posted by Breitbart News of an organization of medical professionals, America’s Frontline Doctors, holding a press conference on coronavirus alongside Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC). Other tech giants once again followed Facebook’s lead, including Twitter, which deleted Breitbart News’ post and locked it out of its account for over four days.

More of the same from liberal social media outlets Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so on..  And this despite their assurances just last week to Congress that they wouldn’t do just this.  It’s beyond outrageous.  The Justice Department (DOJ) should consider investigating these companies for election tampering…which is exactly what they’re doing.  They know they have a monopoly on the way voters get their info.  And, they’re knowingly interfering with a presidential candidate’s ability to communicate in an election year.  If that’s not election tampering, I don’t know what is.  For now, here are a couple official sites you can use to get around the liberal media.  The official Trump 2020 web site is:  http://www.donaldjtrump.com     and the official White House web site is:   www.whitehouse.gov    Of course, if you have Facebook, and want to go there knowing that they censor the sitting President of the United States..  Then, hey..  That site is:  https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/

Facebook scams are on the rise, new report says

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is the latest to chime in with a recent alert about scammers who use Facebook Messenger to trick victims. In its Scam Tracker alert, the BBB said it has “received dozens of reports” about scammers using Facebook Messenger to promote phony grants. The key to the scam is the seeming familiarity of the sender: a friend, family or relative. The scammers often do two things, according to the BBB. They will either hack into your account or create a “lookalike profile” by stealing your photos and personal information. “Either way, scammers are banking that you will trust a message that appears to come from someone you know,” the BBB said. Echoing the BBB alert, this week, Beth Anne Steele with FBI’s Portland office wrote about a personal experience with Facebook messenger. In her post, Steele said that she got a message that looked like it came from a friend. The message included a video link that read: “Hey I saw this video. Isn’t this you?” She didn’t click on the link but was contacted the next day by the friend who said the scammers had hacked his account and that the link contained a virus. There are variations on these friend-and-family scams on Twitter and other social networks. On Twitter, for example, a scammer will send you a tweet purportedly from a person you follow that uses phraseology such as “someone is saying bad things about you” or “someone is spreading rumors about you.” “Scammers use two rules of thumb to lure victims. The first is to gain the confidence of their target through lent credibility…a friend, authority figure, or organization that the victim is likely to trust. The second rule of thumb scammers use is to create a sense of urgency; they want you to act now,” James Lerud, head of the behavioral research team at cybersecurity firm Verodin, said..

Just another reason I don’t use FB..  For more, click on the above..

Independent media rallies behind Alex Jones

Things move very quickly in the media realm, and in quirky ways. Despite the fact that Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify banned controversial broadcast host and “InfoWars” creator Alex Jones, he still led the national trends on Twitter throughout Monday. Such is the irony of social media. Certain content producers are banished from busy sites for violating “community rules” about the nature and tone of content — then the public can’t wait to talk about them. And talk they did. All that aside, the Texas-based Mr. Jones bypassed both traditional news and social media sites and immediately produced a “world exclusive” outlining his response from “being banned from the internet,” then streamed the statement from his own website, and on Twitter, where he still has a presence. Though they may not agree with Mr. Jones’ work or philosophy, many observers are troubled by the banning. “It is a dangerous cliff that these social media companies are jumping off to satisfy CNN and other liberal outlets,” said Media Research Center founder and veteran media analyst Brent Bozell. “This is part of a disturbing trend. In recent months top conservative congressmen have been shadowbanned on Twitter. Pro-life and pro-gun posts and videos are often removed on several platforms. Liberal journalists even objected to one conservative outlet attending a meeting with Facebook. Several conservative organizations like Live Action, the NRA and even the Christian satire site Babylon Bee have complained they had posts removed or censored,” Mr. Bozell continued. “Social media sites are supposedly neutral platforms, but they are increasingly becoming opportunities for the left and major media to censor any content that they don’t like,” he said, warning that the ban on Mr. Jones is “just the beginning.” Some other media forces were also at work. On Monday the Drudge Report led with Mr. Jones’ story — which is a monster-sized mention. The proverbial Drudge “hit” yields huge readership. Consider that in the last 24 hours alone, 29 million people visited Drudge, which is formatted like straightforward, old-school news. There are terse, pertinent headlines — lots of them — and all are immediately accessible, the provided links leading to the original content. Some heavy thinkers also stepped forward to have a say on Twitter, some characterizing Mr. Jones’ experiences as something right out of communist nation of yore. “Whether you like @RealAlexJones and Infowars or not, he is undeniably the victim today of collusion by the big tech giants. What price free speech?” asked British broadcaster and political analyst Nigel Farage. “Alex Jones is now an unperson, straight out of the plot of George Orwell’s 1984. Regardless what you think of him and Infowars, this is the equivalent of digital book burning and sets a horrifying precedent for mass censorship by Big Tech,” tweeted Mark Dice, an author and independent media analyst.

Agreed!!  This censorship by big tech is beyond outrageous.  Shame on ALL of them!!  For more, click on the text above.  And, if you are curious to see what all these tech companies don’t want you to see, just go to:  http://www.infowars.com   and you be the judge.

Facebook flags Declaration of Independence as hate speech

In the week of America’s Independence Day, the algorithms of Facebook decided that the Declaration of Independence was hate speech. The Liberty County Vindicator, a community newspaper between Houston and Beaumont, had been posting the whole declaration in small daily chunks for nine days on its Facebook page in the run-up to July 4. But the 10th excerpt was not posted Monday as scheduled, and the paper said it received an automated notice saying the post “goes against our standards on hate speech.” Part of the standard notice, Vindicator managing editor Casey Stinnett wrote, included a warning that the newspaper could lose its Facebook account, on which it depends for much of its reach, if there were more violations. The offending passage? It was part of the document’s “Bill of Particulars” against Britain’s King George III: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Mr. Stinnett dryly replied in an article about the rejection, “Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as ‘Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development’ that would have been better. Unfortunately, Jefferson, like most British colonists of his day, did not hold an entirely friendly view of Native Americans.” He noted that the newspaper wanted “a means of contacting Facebook for an explanation or a opportunity to appeal the post’s removal, but it does not appear the folks at Facebook want anyone contacting them. Or, at least, they do not make it easy.” Within a day, Facebook had paid heed, allowing the posting and sending the Vindicator an apology. “It looks like we made a mistake and removed something you posted on Facebook that didn’t go against our Community Standards. We want to apologize and let you know that we’ve restored your content and removed any blocks on your account related to this incorrect action,” Facebook wrote back, the Vindicator reported. Reason magazine pointed out how Facebook’s actions were “silly” but also the inevitable logic of massive social-media sites trying to police millions of messages, a task that cannot be done by humans. “They demonstrate a problem with automated enforcement of hate speech policies, which is that a robot trained to spot politically incorrect language isn’t smart enough to detect when that language is part of a historically significant document,” wrote Christian Britschgi, an assistant editor at the libertarian magazine.

You really can’t make this stuff up, folks..

Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your Phone’s Mic

“Can I try the Cole Haans in a size 8?” Later that night on Facebook: An advertisement for Cole Haan pumps. OK, maybe a coincidence. “What’s the best high-tech scale?” my wife asks aloud. Five minutes later on Instagram: An ad for scales. Wait, are they listening? “Get the little red Sudafed pills,” my mom says after I sneeze. That afternoon: An advertisement for Sudafed PE. Yep, they’ve even wiretapped my bodily functions. A conspiracy theory has spread among Facebook and Instagram users: The company is tapping our microphones to target ads. It’s not. “Facebook does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed,” says Facebook. Yeah, sure, and the government swears it isn’t keeping any pet aliens at Area 51. So I contacted former Facebook employees and various advertising technology experts, who all cited technical and legal reasons audio snooping isn’t possible. Uploading and scanning that much audio data “would strain even the resources of the NSA,” says former Facebook ad-targeting product manager Antonio Garcia Martinez. “They would need to understand the context of what you are saying—not just listen for words,” says Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager. I believe them, but for another reason: Facebook is now so good at watching what we do online—and even offline, wandering around the physical world—it doesn’t need to hear us.

Click on the text above for more..

Yale Researchers Accidentally Expose Facebook’s Bias Against Conservative Media

A Yale-published study claiming to mirror Facebook’s new methodology for sorting “broadly trusted” news sources from partisan news inadvertently undermines its author’s own advocacy of the methodology by listing far-left sites Salon.com and HuffingtonPost as “mainstream” while packing its “hyper-partisan” category with right-of-center news sources. Politico ran with the headline “GOP voters trust CNN, N.Y. Times over Breitbart, InfoWars.” A more accurate headline would have been “Single Working Paper With Questionable Methodology Shows GOP Voters Trust CNN Over Breitbart.” But that probably would have got them fewer clicks. What the study actually shows, by the authors’ own admission, is that mainstream media sources are most likely to achieve a “broadly trusted” rating by surveyed subjects due to their name recognition, not due to the quality of their journalism. In the study, the authors admit that if Facebook were to sort news on the basis of “trustworthiness” surveys, it would favor established, mainstream outlets and punish new media — because newer, unfamiliar sources are less likely to be trusted. Given the apparent role of familiarity in judgments of trustworthiness, highly rigorous news sources that are less-well known (or that are new) are likely to receive low trust ratings – and thus will have difficulty gaining prominence on social media. Relatedly, it is unclear how the crowdsourcing approach will scale when trying to cover the massive number of outlets which produce news content online, many (perhaps most) of which will be unfamiliar to most raters. Nevertheless, the authors of the study — one of whom recently retweeted a post calling the Nunes memo a “stunt” born from “right-wing fever swamps” that “recklessly breathe life into conspiracy theories.” — claim this is totally fine. In fact, they think Facebook doesn’t go far enough. The problem, according to Rand, is that Zuckerberg has said that Facebook will only count users’ trust ratings for sites that they say they’ve heard of. In other words, if a user’s answer to the first question—do you recognize this website?—is no, their answer to the second question is thrown out. Rand said that broad unfamiliarity with a site can be a good signal that it’s unreliable. After all, “fake news” is often peddled on URL’s that few would have ever heard of. Such an approach would, by the authors’ own admission, favor established, recognizable news outlets and punish newer sites. That includes openly right-wing news sites like Breitbart News, but also anti-establishment voices of the left that are despised by the mainstream, like Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept. The authors also demonstrate their super-sound judgment and academic objectivity in their list of “mainstream” and “hyper-partisan” news sources.

That, of course, is sarcasm.  FaceBook is clearly liberal media.  They should at least be honest and open about their bias.  Anyway, to see a list, and read the rest of this excellent analysis, click on the text above.

‘Hunt & Kill All White Women’ Facebook Post Deemed Not Hate Speech

The way in which Facebook polices content on its network is under scrutiny again after it was revealed that a post in which a user called for white women to be “hunted and killed” was deemed to not be a violation of community standards. “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.” Meanwhile, posts by Christians that simply state bible passages in discussions about homosexuality are being removed, while pages devoted to showing grisly mock images of President Trump being assassinated are not taken down. The social networking giant has also received criticism for several recent incidents during which rapes of women have been been live video streamed on the platform. Facebook also refused to remove the infamous video where a mentally disabled man was tortured by a group of young black men when it was reported. It seems that Facebook is too busy complying with threats to remove so-called “fake news” to deal with actual examples of hate speech and violence.

Agreed!!  As usual, the hypocrisy of the liberal media, which FaceBook is clearly part of, is truly breathtaking and brazen.  They don’t even try to mask their liberal stance and agendas.  They’re up front and in your face about it.  If a white person had said this about black women, we ALL know that post would come did immediately.  But, again, there is a double standard with the dominantly liberal mainstream media, and with so-called “social media.”  Anyway, to see some of these shocking posts, and read the rest of this article, click on the text above.  Unreal..

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. Facebook’s “Community Standards” page lists “hate speech” as one of its prohibitions, along with “violence and graphic content,” and nudity. The article linked by Savage was about a pregnant woman in Reutlingen, Germany, who was hacked to death with a meat cleaver by a 21-year-old Syrian refugee. On his show Monday, Savage chastised Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, saying he “doesn’t care about my audience.” “He doesn’t care about the audience of conservatives. He’d rather you all drop dead and go home,” Savage said. Savage described Zuckerberg as a “classless citizen who enjoys all the benefits of America, enjoys all of the wealth that America has given him, and he stabs America in the back by siding with the Islamic terrorist nations of Iran and Saudi Arabia.” “That’s why he would ban me from posting an article, which I didn’t write, incidentally,” Savage said. “It was a link an article about a Muslim in Germany, about a week ago, who cut a nine-month pregnant woman to death in the street. “Zuckerberg found that offensive and anti-Islamic.”

Crazy..  To read the rest of this article, click on the text above.

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users. Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module. In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.” These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment. “Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “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.” The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said. Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.” Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories. Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work. Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook. “We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.

Wow..Glad I don’t have FaceBook.  For those of you who do..  Now you at least know what they do with their “trending” news stories, and what sources they get it from.  Typical liberal (social) media..