Big Tech Firms are Using Automation to Censor News About the Coronavirus

I received a 24-hour suspension from FB for calling Americans, bloody idiots! Firstly, it’s accurate, and secondly, I should have the right to bloody think what I want.  

Social media is awash with people angry that their posts have been removed for no legitimate reason. MintPress was no exception, with a story about Cuba’s response to the coronavirus flagged and blocked.

Source

http://www.mintpressnews.com

by Alan Macleod

March 18th, 2020

Big tech is again attempting to define the range of acceptable political discussion on its platforms; this week YouTube announced a number of changes in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic, chief among those being that automated systems, rather than humans, will predominantly be authorizing or removing content in the foreseeable future.

“As COVID-19 evolves, we’re doing our best to support those who watch, create, & make a living on YouTube. Many of us here & in our extended workforce are unable to work as usual, so we’re reducing staffing in certain offices, causing some disruptions,” it said in a message on Twitter. “With fewer people to review content, our automated systems will be stepping in to keep YouTube safe. More videos will be removed than normal during this time, including content that does not violate our Community Guidelines. We know this will be hard for all of you.”

The news that the video sharing platform is now at the mercy of an automated system that even its creators admit does not function properly was greeted with skepticism, especially as YouTube did not explain why watching and judging content on its platform could not be done remotely.

Other big tech firms like Facebook and Twitter also notified the public that they were switching to potentially defective automated moderation during the pandemic. Facebook had been criticized last week for insisting that employees continue to come to work but has now performed an about face. “We may see some longer response times and make more mistakes as a result,” it similarly warned.

The problem with measures like these is that the way the algorithms have been designed, they generally hit alternative media hardest. In the past, Facebook has deleted pages belonging to anti-establishment outlets like the Black Agenda Report and Venezuelanalysis on the unsubstantiated grounds that they were potentially Russian-backed fake news or simply for “suspicious behavior.” In early February, Twitter blocked the account of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and deleted those of 2,000 of his supporters.

Immediately after the new changes were implemented, social media was awash with people angry that their posts had been removed for no legitimate reason. MintPress was no exception, with our story about Cuba’s response to the coronavirus flagged and blocked. Meanwhile, it appears alternative media outlet 21st Century Wire has been deleted altogether. MintPress CEO Mnar Muhawesh described it as censorship under the guise of fighting fake news.

Whether active or not, big tech algorithms privilege corporate media and de-list, de-rank and de-monetize alternative stances against war, empire and government secrecy, bucking the government line, often being precisely why people visit the sites in the first place.

Big media giants are becoming increasingly intertwined with big government agencies that they are supposed to be holding to account. In their book titled, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, Eric Schmidt and fellow Google executive Jared Cohen wrote, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first.” Last year, Facebook announced that it was partnering with NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council, in order to help weed out fake news on its site. The Council’s board is a whos-who of high state officials, including Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and multiple former CIA chiefs, including Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and Michael Morell. After working with the council, Facebook immediately began banning and removing accounts linked to media in official enemy states like Iran, Russia, and Venezuela and began silencing critics of Western governments.

39 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook, 20 percent from YouTube and 15 percent from Twitter, according to the 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Furthermore, similar numbers of people in other countries rely on those platforms to understand world events; effectively meaning the U.S. government is increasingly in control of what the planet sees online. A case in point is Iran in January, when, at the behest of the Trump administration, Instagram banned all messages of support for General Qassem Soleimani, who had been killed in a U.S. drone strike. “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its leadership,” a tech spokesperson said. Instagram has over 24 million Iranian users. A University of Maryland poll found over 80 percent of Iranians held a positive view of the general, meaning that Trump, through Silicon Valley monopolies over online communication, could effectively censor a majority opinion from being spoken by Iranians, to Iranians.

One of the principal problems with any decision over moderation on these tech giants is that they are so dominant they have effectively become public utilities, too big, and too important not to use. But until they are either broken up or nationalized, their opaque structure will always lead to decisions like this which increase suspicion and alienation.

Feature photo | An activist of the group ‘Pause the System’ dresses up to protest in front of the Downing Street gate to ask the government to follow WHO guidelines for the coronavirus outbreak in London, March 17, 2020. Frank Augstein | AP

Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Stupid Facebook Censorship

Here is an example of political censorship from Facebook (for those of you who don’t use Facebook)

I commented on a post: “Idiotic Americans. Bernie was your savior. Now, watch Bad Orange Man eat up the senile Biden come November. You deserve Trump.”

Facebook banned me for 24 hours for saying this. Stupid Americans cannot be told dissident opinions, as their puny brainwashed brains cannot handle it.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee unveils plan to ‘build a better web’

Tim Berners-Lee’s the Contract for the Web offers plan to counter misinformation, data surveillance and censorship.

Source

http://www.aljazeera.com

Nov 25, 2019

More than 150 organisations including Microsoft and Reddit and interest groups like Reporters Without Borders and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have backed the plan [File: Simon Dawson/Reuters]

 

World wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has released an ambitious plan for online governance designed to counteract the growing prevalence of misinformation, data surveillance and censorship.

The Contract for the Web, created by Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation, seeks commitments from governments and the industry to make and keep knowledge freely available.

“If we don’t act now – and act together – to prevent the web being misused by those who want to exploit, divide and undermine, we are at risk of squandering” its potential for good, Berners-Lee said in a statement from his foundation on Monday.

Partners in the non-binding endeavour include Google and Facebook, whose data-collecting business models and sensation-rewarding algorithms have been blamed for exacerbating online toxicity.

The British engineer said the contract, developed in cooperation with dozens of experts and members of the public, is “a roadmap to build a better web”.

He called on governments to “strengthen laws and regulations” and companies “to ensure pursuit of profit is not at the expense of human rights and democracy“.

“Citizens must hold those in power accountable, demand their digital rights be respected and help foster healthy conversation online,” Berners-Lee added.

The Web Foundation

✔@webfoundation

The web is one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever had to transform our lives for the better.

But never before has the web’s power for good been more under threat.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can — and must — fight for the #WebWeWant. Join us.http://contractfortheweb.org/action 

Contract for the Web

Be part of the Contract for the Web and join the fight for the web we want.

contractfortheweb.org

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3:01 PM – Nov 24, 2019

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More than 150 organisations including Microsoft and Reddit and interest groups like Reporters Without Borders and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have backed the plan.

Meanwhile, the governments of France, Germany and Ghana are on board, as are thousands of individuals.

The unveiling of Berners-Lee’s contract comes as leaders from government, business and civil society gather in Berlin, Germany for the four-day United Nations Internet Governance Forum.

“I will stand up for the preservation of the free internet that we have grown to know and love in recent decades,” German economy minister Peter Altmaier said in a statement ahead of the UN gathering.

Among the concerns that prompted the creation of the contract, Berners-Lee mentioned cyberbullying, uneven access to the internet worldwide and increased governmental control of domestic networks in countries including China, Iran and Russia.

“The trend for Balkanisation is really worrying and it’s extreme at the moment in Iran,” said Berners-Lee. “A strong government exhibits tolerance, the computer scientist added, for other voices, opposition voices, foreign voices to be heard by its citizens.”

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES

Wall Street Journal investigation confirms Google operates censorship blacklist

Source

http://www.wsws.org

Andre Damon

18 November 2019

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal has confirmed many of the central allegations made by the World Socialist Web Site in 2017 regarding Google’s censorship of the internet.

In an extensive article published Friday, the Journal concludes that, contrary to Google’s repeated assertions, the company maintains blacklists of individual websites and intervenes directly to manipulate individual search results.

On July 27, 2017, the World Socialist Web Site reported that changes to Google’s search algorithm, internally dubbed “Project Owl,” had drastically reduced search traffic to left-wing, antiwar and progressive websites.

The WSWS based its assertions on Google’s public declarations that it was seeking to “surface more authoritative content” and demote “alternative viewpoint[s],” as well as detailed data from the WSWS’s analytics systems and data provided by other websites and publicly available web and search traffic estimators.

Based on these data points, the WSWS concluded that Google was operating a blacklist of opposition news outlets, the primary impact of which was to restrict access to left-wing and antiwar websites.

The WSWS was a central target of this initiative. As we explained: “Google has severed links between the World Socialist Web Site and the 45 most popular search terms that previously directed readers to the WSWS. The physical censorship implemented by Google is so extensive that of the top 150 search terms that, as late as April 2017, connected the WSWS with readers, 145 no longer do so.”

On August 25, 2017, David North, the chairperson of the WSWS International Editorial Board, published an open letter to Google asserting:

Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech.

These assertions have been dramatically confirmed by the Wall Street Journal investigation. Its report concludes:

Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by US or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.

The report went on to substantiate its claim that the company’s actions were in contradiction to its public statements:

Google has said in congressional testimony it doesn’t use blacklists. Asked in a 2018 hearing whether Google had ever blacklisted a “company, group, individual or outlet … for political reasons,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: “No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,” according to the transcript.

But the newspaper’s investigation concluded that Google takes “what the company calls ‘manual actions’ against specific websites,” adding, “The company could also blacklist a website, or remove it altogether.”

The Journal report argues that Ben Gomes, “one of Google’s early search executives,” was an early advocate of direct, manual intervention into search terms. It was Gomes who announced what would later be known as “Project Owl” in an April 25, 2017 blog post under the title, “Our latest quality improvements for Search.”

In that blog post, Google claimed that its efforts to promote “authoritative” news sources were an extension of its attempts to combat efforts to “’game’ our systems in order to appear higher in search results.” But the investigation by the Wall Street Journal reveals this to be a total fraud.

“There’s this idea that the search algorithm is all neutral and goes out and combs the web and comes back and shows what it found, and that’s total BS,” the newspaper cites an unnamed former executive as saying. “Google deals with special cases all the time.”

The report documents how the company maintains its blacklists:

Engineers known as “maintainers” are authorized to make and approve changes to blacklists. It takes at least two people to do this; one person makes the change, while a second approves it, according to the person familiar with the matter.

The Journal reviewed a draft policy document from August 2018 that outlines how Google employees should implement an “anti-misinformation” blacklist aimed at blocking certain publishers from appearing in Google News and other search products.

Its report continues:

Google’s culture of publicly resisting demands to change results has diminished, current and former employees said. A few years ago, the company dismantled a global team focused on free-speech issues that, among other things, publicized the company’s legal battles to fight changes to search results, in part because Google had lost several of those battles in court, according to a person familiar with the change… “Free expression was no longer a winner,” the person said.

The investigation by the Wall Street Journal raises serious questions about the coverage of Google’s censorship in the New York Times. After publishing a report on September 27, 2017 on the front page of its business section concerning the WSWS’s open letter opposing Google’s censorship, including an interview with David North, the Times went on to attempt to discredit accusations that Google was carrying out political censorship.

In a follow-up article, Daisuke Wakabayashi, who conducted the interview with North, sought to whitewash Google’s censorship regime, echoing the company’s self-serving denials without any serious examination of the facts. Wakabayashi wrote: “Google said political ideology was not a factor in any aspect of its search results. Google said that whether a user is conservative or liberal is not part of the information collected by the company, and that it didn’t categorize web pages by political leanings.”

This, too, was a fraud. Google’s decision about which sites were “authoritative” was clearly political in nature.

In 2018, Google set up a “news initiative” to “Clean Up False News,” as the New York Times reported. Among its partners are the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, all of which circulated false statements by the Bush administration regarding so-called “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, among countless other lies.

Google’s statements about promoting “authoritative” news outlets is code for promoting news outlets that support US foreign policy and the lies that underpin it, because, as the Journal writes, “search is a zero-sum game: A change that helps lift one result inevitably pushes down another.”

Aside from the initial report in the New York Times and a report by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, the vast majority of corporate news outlets simply ignored the WSWS’s reporting.

But notably, before he was gagged and arrested, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange penned a letter to an online event organized by the WSWS warning about the dangers of internet censorship. It stated:

While the internet has brought about a revolution in people’s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control… I commend WSWS for drawing attention to this phenomenon.

In the three years since Google announced its efforts to bury “alternative viewpoint[s],” the censorship drive by major technology corporations has only intensified. In multiple mass deletions, Facebook and Twitter have removed left-wing accounts and pages with millions of followers.

Last month, Twitter announced that it would ban all political advertisements on its platform, while Facebook, despite the declarations by Mark Zuckerberg that it will not carry out political censorship, announced that it would remove any posts that include the name of the alleged CIA “whistleblower” in the Trump impeachment inquiry.

The motivation for the relentless efforts at political censorship promoted by all factions of the political establishment is their fear of the growth of working-class opposition all over the world, which is bound up with the growing audience for socialism.

Andre Damon

YOUTUBE IS PLANNING TO DELETE ALL ACCOUNTS THAT AREN’T “COMMERCIALLY VIABLE” STARTING DECEMBER 10

YouTube is Planning to Delete All Accounts That Aren’t “Commercially Viable” Starting December 10

Ethan Huff
November 14th, 2019
Natural News

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is obvious censorship. YouTube is planning to silence those who disagree with the political/ruling class and have taken sides. Speaking truth to power is now borderline criminal. The censorship continues…

This article was originally published by Ethan Huff at Natural News. 

Content creators everywhere are starting to panic about an upcoming policy change over at YouTube that threatens to eliminate all accounts and channels on the Google-owned video platform that are deemed to no longer be “commercially viable.”

In the “Account Suspension & Termination” section of YouTube’s “Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes,” guidelines, the company explains that, as of December 10, 2019, “YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service, if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.”

In other words, if you have a YouTube channel that YouTube employees decide isn’t profitable enough for Google, then the company has now granted itself the option to completely shut down your account without warning or consequence.

What this means is that YouTube content creators who’ve built their entire livelihoods around the platform are going to need a backup option in the event that they end up being terminated. One such option is Brighteon.com, which you can sign up for here.

It also means that YouTube has created for itself yet another legal loophole to continue targeting channels that disseminate politically incorrect content, which YouTube has been trying to silence from its platform for at least the past several years.

In essence, YouTube now has a blanket excuse to pull down all channels that it wants to see eliminated by simply claiming that these channels are no longer profitable. And there will likely be no way for targeted YouTube users to prove otherwise.

According to YouTube, these changes merely make the company’s Terms of Service “clearer and easier to understand.” But for most people carefully observing what’s going on, the obvious reality is that YouTube is once again up to no good.

“The terms could be a way for YouTube to remove channels that promote hate speech, conspiracy theories, or harmful messages whose content isn’t extreme enough to warrant an outright ban, as these are unlikely to be commercially viable,” writes Rob Thubron for Techspot, illustrating this point.

“But if this is the case, it needs to be clearly explained,” he adds.

For more related news about Big Tech’s plot to subvert online free speech, be sure to check out Censorship.news.

ALL YOUTUBE HAS TO DO NOW TO SILENCE FREE SPEECH IS DEMONETIZE CHANNELS IT DOESN’T LIKE AND FORCE THEM INTO COMMERCIAL NON-VIABILITY

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what YouTube is planning to do once this policy change comes into full effect.

We already know that many conservative-leaning YouTube channels have been demonetized by YouTube with the goal of driving them out of business. However, thanks to workarounds like Patreon, many of these channels are still up and running, despite YouTube’s best efforts to financially destroy them.

Since mere demonetization hasn’t led to the outcome that YouTube hoped for, the Google-owned video platform is now making “commercial viability,” as arbitrarily defined by YouTube, a new requirement to maintain a presence on YouTube.

“First they’ll demonetize you, then they’ll remove you completely because you are no longer ‘commercially viable,’” warns Twitter user “Raging Golden Eagle” about where this all is headed.

If you’re a YouTube creator or know someone who is, let this be the writing on the wall as to what’s coming in less than a month. YouTube wants total control over everything that happens on its platform, just like its parent company Google wants over its search engine platform.

“Just another backdoor attempt at censorship and traffic steering,” wrote one Techspot commenter in response to the news.

“In a few years, YouTube will only allow creators that have a minimum of 100K followers within 90 days of launch and they’ll have to be a member of the local communist party.”

Exercise your free speech, without commercial censorship, at Brighteon.com.

It’s all Fake News

Source

sputniknews.com

by Jon Gaunt

Oct 14, 2019

CC BY 2.0 / Coffee Lover

Without a hint of irony one of the stars of the Biased Broadcasting Corporation, Nick Robinson, says that when Boris Johnson uses Twitter or Facebook to get his message out to the people he is using “propaganda like a dictator”.

However, an alternative view is that Boris is using social media, as Trump has had to, because the only way to get a right of centre view out to the masses is by staying clear of the terrible left-wing, anti-Brexit, anti-capitalist mainstream media. So who can blame him or Trump?

For too long the BBC, Sly News and of course outfits like CNN (The Clinton News Network) have been able to filter and spin the news to their political and social justice warrior, virtue signalling angle.

Trump showed the world that he didn’t need their bias and they hated it when he went over their biased heads and straight into every one of his core supporters’ mobile phone or laptops and then into the White House.

Nigel Farage and the Brexit party used similar techniques in the EU elections to great effect.

Of course, the responses from the lefties and Cultural Marxists that infest the media on both sides of the Atlantic was to call foul and blame the usual suspects, those pesky Russians, which of course has now been proven to be absolute FAKE News.

Before I go on let’s also remind ourselves that the King of using Facebook and political profiling was the darling of the soft left, Barrack Obama. In this country, the hardcore commies who prop up Comrade Corbyn, in Momentum, are also brilliant at using the new media.

The mainstream media have had it all their way for far too long and they haven’t quite got used to the idea that they no longer control the agenda.

© REUTERS / HENRY NICHOLLS

Anti-Brexit protester Steve Bray demonstrates outside the venue where the Conservative Party annual conference is held in Manchester, Britain, September 28, 2019

In the mainstream press the popular cliché was that Rupert Murdoch decided who the next Government would be. Who can forget the Ex-editor of the Sun, Kelvin Mackenzie, and his brilliant Neil Kinnock lightbulb front page which declared “Will the last person out of Britain switch off the lights”, illustrated with the Welsh windbag as a dim lightbulb.

However, the truth is, that although Murdoch had power and influence, what he was most adept at, just like the Wizard of OZ, was at spinning his own reputation.

Murdoch just knew, aided and abetted by the brilliance of his former Political editor at the Sun, Trevor Kavanaugh which horse to back in the final stages of any election race.

Today, however, the stark reality is that the “dinosaur” press has hardly any influence. I mean who even considers buying a newspaper these days let alone reads one? The editors, proprietors and most importantly the dwindling readers know this to be the truth.

Meanwhile a new poll by Sky News this morning states that only 1 in 7 of the UK population have any faith in the Politicians to deliver the right outcome on Brexit and only 1 in 100 trust politicians “a lot”.

This is pretty damning of our politics and politicians. But, despite this massive slap in the face for the establishment Sky News are spinning the results as a case of laying “bare how three and a half years of grinding negotiations since the 2016 referendum have worn down public trust in politicians”.

© REUTERS / YVES HERMAN

Britain’s Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage attends a plenary session on preparations for the next EU leaders’ summit, at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium October 9, 2019

What a load of hogwash! We have all hated politicians and their mates in the MSM ever since the expenses scandal when we realised that they were all self-serving pigs with their snouts in the trough.

It was also clear that the MSM were, both metaphorically or literally sleeping, with these pigs and that they had forgotten that the real relationship between the free press and a politician should be that of a dog and a lamppost.

This is why all the Brexit coverage has been so biased. The leftie, EU loving lickspittles who infest the BBC and Sly News never wanted or expected us the common people to vote for Brexit.  They have still not recovered from the day when they had to cancel their summer holidays in their villas in Tuscany on 23 June 2016 as we the people spoke and said we wanted out.

These people in the media and politics, whichever colour rosette they wear, when they knock on your door have no real empathy or even sympathy with the common people and in fact openly despise us. Some do it by spending our taxes, via expenses, on a duck house or even buying a poppy, others by adopting a mock Brummie accent and pretending to be down with the working class! I despise all of them.

Nick Robinson is correct to say that when Boris broadcasts on Facebook that “There’s no capacity for anybody to say, ‘What did you mean about that?’ or .Hold on a second.’ Politicians do need to be held to account. He is correct to say, “it is undemocratic to avoid proper scrutiny by journalists”.

But do we have proper journalists anymore or do we now just have activists posing as journalists and broadcasters?

And Nick please tell me about the bias when right of centre politicians appear on the BBC and they get treated as if they are extremists and are always cut off or sneered at before they even start their point, let alone finish it?

Look at the way Andrew Marr thought it was acceptable to give our Home Secretary, Priti Patel, dressing down for smirking when he trotted out a load of old clichés about the dangers of leaving the EU. He was the one using propaganda, and who the hell does Andrew Marr think he is to take the moral high ground?

© REUTERS / VICTORIA JONES

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II welcomes newly elected leader of the Conservative party Boris Johnson during an audience at Buckingham Palace, London, Wednesday July 24, 2019, where she invited him to become Prime Minister and form a new government

Then, of course, we have Lady Haw-Haw of BBC Newsnight who thinks she is representing the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation every time an EU sceptic is stupid enough to appear on that poorly watched programme.

Over on Channel 4 News, Boris is treating Jon (I’ve never seen so many white people) Snow with the same disdain as Trump treats CNN and is refusing to be interviewed by them.

The pity of all this, of course, is that our politicians, of all persuasions, do need to be held to account but mainstream broadcasting news has become so biased and so Cultural Marxist in its attitude that this has become impossible.

The way the BBC have tied themselves up in knots over Naga Munchetty’s remark about Trump is a perfect example of what has gone wrong.

The so-called regulator, OFCOM, have been as much use as a chocolate fireguard in this case because they too are stuffed full of snowflakes and Cultural Marxists and ex BBC lackeys. It seems that both organisations almost offer a job share approach to regulation and freedom.

This why I say it is time to scrap the licence fee and impartiality. Allow broadcast news to have an opinion and attitude just as our free press is allowed too.

People are clever enough to understand bias and big enough to be able to watch whichever channel they fancy.

For God’s sake, it is already happening with the internet. People now choose where to get their news from.

The idea that in the 21st century we still have news controlled by an establishment elite who all hold essentially the same globalist and cultural attitudes is ridiculous.

Let’s scrap the BBC, Scrap OFCOM and scrap partial impartial news.

Let the market decide who is telling the truth and who is peddling FAKE news!

The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

When social media stops being social: How Twitter and Facebook have rendered Americans uncivil, insecure and addicted

Source

http://www.rt.com

By Helen Buyniski, RT

9 Oct, 2019

© Pixabay / Skitterphoto

Social media can be a powerful weapon for truth in the right hands. Unfortunately, Twitter and Facebook have done their best to keep it out of those hands – and people are starting to call them out for the damage they’ve done.

“It’s hard to think of a company that’s hurt this country more than Twitter,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on Tuesday night, in conversation with congressman Devin Nunes (R-California), who is suing Twitter for allegedly permitting users to gang up on him.

ALSO ON RT.COMFacebook ‘News’: A bold step toward total control of reality?

If you look at the hate, division and the cruelty that’s now common, it wasn’t common 10 years ago. Twitter’s a huge part of that.

Carlson may be unfairly singling Twitter out – Facebook and, to a lesser extent, YouTube have also contributed to the rapid deterioration of civil discourse in the US – but as a whole, the major social media platforms are transforming a huge cross-section of American internet traffic into petty groupthink-driven drama factories. Worse, their ubiquity has made them all but imperative to anyone who hopes to work in any public-facing profession. After all, only an antisocial person would consciously avoid social media!

Trapped in the echo chamber

Twitter and Facebook keep users on their platforms by serving up more of what the user likes, creating an echo chamber that can be impenetrable, depending on how comfortable the user is with unfamiliar ideas. If one doesn’t take care to interact with users elsewhere on the political spectrum, it’s easy to believe that the entire country wants President Donald Trump impeached, or that the average Iranian is hungry for regime-change.

Studies have confirmed that the echo-chamber phenomenon is strongest when it comes to political content, and users can make this worse by muting or blocking those they disagree with. When they do finally collide with reality, the awakening is seldom pleasant – as was the case in 2016, when blue-state liberals belatedly realized there was a whole other America they’d been ignoring, and it was upset enough to elect a reality-show personality as president.

© Pixabay / Mediamodifier

Geopolitics according to Twitter

The two biggest platforms have made the echo-chamber phenomenon worse by deplatforming large numbers of users who dissent from the neoliberal-centrist views of their CEOs. Thousands of Iranian Twitter accounts supporting their government got the boot in June, while Facebook and Twitter both deleted hundreds of Iranian accounts they said were bots last year. Yet thousands of Twitter accounts operated by the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK)- a cult of Iranian exiles loathed by their countrymen for collaborating with Iraq against Iran – remain in operation, tweeting (usually in English) about their desire for the US to take out the “regime.”

The same technique has been used to silence pro-Chinese voices in the wake of the Hong Kong protests, which began in opposition to an extradition bill that has since been shelved, and are heavily  backed by American and British money,   and to silence Venezuelans opposed to the US-backed opposition leader Guaido – to say nothing of the “Russian bots” used as the rationale for kickstarting the whole mass-deplatforming craze. Included in these sweeps are many American users who’ve done nothing more than support a foreign government that the US doesn’t like.

Beyond convincing Americans that the world really does love the US’ belligerent foreign policy, Twitter and Facebook have a death grip on domestic politics, aided and abetted by Google. “Rogue” political candidates like Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard are blocked from trending on Twitter, and even Trump has his ads removed by Facebook.

The ever-shifting rules of what constitutes “hate speech” keep users whose political views are outside the mainstream from expressing opinions that are too strong, while those whose views align with what they see on TV need not take such precautions and can merrily smear and abuse those with whom they disagree.

ALSO ON RT.COMMost Americans think social media has too much control over news, according to poll mainstream media quietly ignored

Censorship disguised as freedom to speak

Twitter does add insult to injury in a way that even Facebook doesn’t, by gaslighting its users within an inch of their sanity – calling itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” a line CEO Jack Dorsey claimed last year was meant in jest (a qualifier that was nowhere near the original 2012 statement).

Indeed, both platforms are effectively shrinking-room traps that lure everyone on with the promise that their freedom of speech will be respected, then gradually ban more and more opinions until users are incapable of anything but parroting pre-approved soundbites.

YouTube has perhaps taken this further than anyone, appending Wikipedia blurbs to videos that discuss controversial topics like the September 11 attacks or mass shootings. CEO Susan Wojcicki insists the company is “committed to openness,” even as it mass-deplatforms users whose content doesn’t even violate the rules.

Perhaps the worst effect of Twitter and Facebook’s consolidation into monopolies controlling the lion’s share of US internet communication has been that they now dictate social norms. Twitter has kicked users off its platform for making the rather uncontroversial statement that men aren’t women – a view held by most of the American population.

Both platforms have done more than perhaps anyone other than the National Security Agency (NSA) to get Americans used to the idea that privacy is an outmoded, useless concept – even an undesirable one. And by redefining “hate speech” to mean “speech that makes [advocacy group] uncomfortable,” they’ve deftly eviscerated the First Amendment while trivializing the existence of actual bigotry.

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The rise of “woke” Twitter has also forced celebrities, companies and journalists to police their speech to the point of absurdity. Twitter ‘detectives’ dig through decade-old tweets and Facebook posts of public figures in the hope of surfacing a racist rant or two and getting that figure “canceled.”

Companies from Home Depot to Blizzard have suffered customer boycotts at the hands of woke-Twitter mobs. People have lost jobs, roles and significant amounts of public status over statements that were not even controversial when they were uttered – thanks to the rapid adoption of politically-correct speech norms, largely at the hands of those same social media platforms.

And even for those users who avoid politics completely (or try to), social media has reduced the national attention span to sub-goldfish levels, with users perpetually refreshing their feeds to make sure they don’t miss anything and spiraling into anxiety when separated from their phones or wifi for any length of time.

The concept of FOMO or “fear of missing out” did not have a name before Facebook (and later Twitter and Instagram) turned it into an epidemic. Numerous behavioral studies have linked social media use to depression and anxiety, especially in young people without a solid identity.  Instagram ‘celebrities’ are literally called “influencers” because their followers emulate them. Those influencers in turn feel such pressure to perform they’ll run up thousands of dollars in debt trying to maintain the picture-perfect lifestyle.

All of the problems that social media causes in adults are magnified in children. If Tucker Carlson thinks Twitter has ruined America now, he should see it in 20 years – assuming it’s still around.