Tag Archives: Censor

Facebook and Google removing content that harms Democrat party

Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter purging conservative speech (Source: The Stream)
Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter purging conservative speech

There were a few interesting stories about Big Technology companies censoring content critical of the Democrat party. The first one involves Facebook censoring two anti-Biden ads. The second one involves Google / Youtube censoring a video featuring a Stanford University medical doctor. The third one involves Twitter censoring a Chinese scientist. Let’s take a look at the stories.

Here’s the first story from Daily Wire:

The ad launched on Aug. 4 before getting slapped with a “mostly false” rating by PolitiFact and subsequently blocked by Facebook the next month. The ad directly quotes Biden declaring, “If you elect me, your taxes are going to be raised, not cut,” and warns that his plan will raise taxes “on all income groups.”

[…]PolitiFact specifically cites a “Biden campaign official” as supposed evidence of the Democrat’s intent (emphasis added):

The full exchange shows that Biden was saying his plan would raise taxes for people who, in his words, “benefited from” the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. A Biden campaign official said his point was that the wealthy — not all Americans — would not benefit from his plan.

The ad’s portrayal of the exchange leaves a different impression.

And another ad predicted that allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports would end women’s sports. Politifact admits that they can’t fact-check a prediction, but they censored the ad anyway:

America First is not the only conservative organization censored by the platform. In another recent case, Facebook censored an ad by the conservative American Principles Project that stated that the Democrat-backed Equality Act allowing transgender athletes will “destroy girls sports” because the ad was “missing context and could mislead people.” The censorship was imposed despite PolitiFact openly admitting in its review of the ad that the claim is “a prediction we can’t fact-check.”

Meanwhile, YouTube (which is owned by Google), censored a Hoover Institute discussion about COVID that featured an actually medical doctor from Stanford University.

The Federalist reports:

YouTube, which is owned by Google, removed a video of an interview with [Dr. Scott] Atlas conducted in June originally posted by the Hoover Institution where he serves as a senior fellow. In it, Atlas, a prominent neuroradiologist and professor at Stanford University Medical Center as well as a commentator on public health issues, spoke of his belief that the pandemic lockdowns might have done more harm than good. Since then, his opinions have become of greater interest due to his appointment in August as a presidential advisor and a member of the White House coronavirus task force.

That fact alone ought to make it vital that the public should be able to hear his opinions about the pandemic. YouTube, however, removed the interview from its video streaming service this past weekend for allegedly violating its terms of service.

I have seen my Google search engine traffic from Google drop 90% since Trump won the election in 2016. My current incoming search engine traffic from DuckDuckGo is half of my current Google traffic. And I’m not the only conservative site that’s being censored. Google is in the pocket of the Democrat party.

Meanwhile, Twitter is censoring scientists who make the Chinese Communist Party look bad.

The New York Post reports:

Twitter has suspended the account of a Chinese virologist who has claimed that COVID-19 was manufactured in a laboratory.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a former researcher at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, went dark on the platform after she accused China of covering up evidence that the deadly virus came from a lab in Wuhan.

“They don’t want the people to know this truth. Also, that’s why I got suspended, I got suppression [and] I am the target that China Communist Part wants to [sic] disappear,” she told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday.

Carlson responded, “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt so I’m going to assume you’re not an anti-Chinese racist so it’s not clear why Twitter would shut you down or why you’re being ignored by the rest of the US media.”

Twitter declined to comment to The Post on Wednesday.

If I were in charge, I would just break up all of these big technology companies into tiny little pieces. They’re too big, and they’re dangerous to our liberties.

Facebook censors admit that they suppress Republican content to help Democrat Party

Facebook content moderator explains how she censors Republican content as "terrorism"
Facebook content moderator explains that Republican content is “terrorism”

Project Veritas meets with members of the secular left and get them to talk on camera about how they discriminate against conservatives in order to help Democrats win elections. In this post, we’ll look at their latest sting of Facebook, and review some of Facebook’s censorship of Christians (e.g. – Seth Gruber, Franklin Graham) and conservatives (e.g. – Live Action, PragerU).

Life News reported on the new Project Veritas video:

The Civic Harassment Queue was a list of all the posts that had been flagged for violations of the Community Guidelines. McElroy said, “So, for 75 to 80 percent of the posts to be targeting Republicans and conservatives, you can say it was a bot. But somebody had to design that algorithm. So really, somebody at Facebook.”

[…]An unnamed moderator said that it’s “common sense” to delete posts that have #MAGA in them.

One journalist asked, “If you see a conservative post you just get rid of it, right?” The unnamed moderator responded, saying, “Yes! I don’t give no f*cks, I’ll delete it.”

Another content moderator said:

 “Facebook shadowbans. Facebook is notorious for it, they say they don’t but, it’s clear that people’s content don’t come because it’s been de-filtered off the queue.”

Someone asked on camera, “How many of you are like, take your own stance and say we’re just deleting whatever, all the Trump posts?” An unnamed moderator said, “There are probably like 16 of us.”

A service delivery manager was reportedly caught on camera saying, “Gotta get the Cheeto (Trump) out of office.”

[…]He took screenshots of a memo saying that a poster which showed President Donald Trump’s head being cut off would not be flagged as hate speech. A meme that showed a cartoon of Elmer Fudd shooting at former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke was allegedly flagged as hate speech.

In another screenshot, one memo read, “CNN host Don Lemon recently said ‘white men are the biggest terror threat in this country.’ This is implying that white men are terrorists and so would typically violate (HS Tier 1-2 1:6 dehumanizing speech). As this is a newsworthy event, FB’s content policy team is allowing a exception for this content on the platform.”

The video from Project Veritas features about a dozen content moderators (censors) from Facebook, admitting that they deliberately censor Republican content. My favorite is the woman who says that anything pro-Trump is “terrorism”.

Here’s the full video released by Project Veritas, which features conversations with a dozen Facebook content moderators.

Previously, I’ve blogged about other cases of Facebook censoring Christians and conservatives.

Live Action reported:

In yet another apparent attempt to silence pro-lifers, Facebook has removed a post created by Seth Gruber of Life Training Insitute. Gruber had interviewed abortion survivor Melissa Ohden and was sharing information about the interview on his personal Facebook page when he was sent a warning message from the social media giant — and his post was removed.

Fox News reports on another case of Facebook censoring conservatives:

Four Republican senators blasted Facebook for ‘censorship’ over the tech giant’s recent fact check of pro-life organization Live Action.

In a letter today to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ted Cruz of Texas, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Mike Braun of Indiana condemn the company’s “pattern of censorship” and demand that it issue a correction, remove any restrictions placed on Live Action and its founder Lila Rose, as well as submit to a “meaningful” external audit.

The Washington Times reports:

The Rev. Franklin Graham was kicked off Facebook for defending North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which the social-media giant’s review team decided was hate speech.

Facebook acknowledged over the weekend it had banned the prominent evangelist over transgender issues… But Mr. Graham was having none of it Sunday, calling the move “a personal attack towards me” and an example of the censorship that Silicon Valley has in store for Christians and/or conservatives.

And this one from the Daily Caller:

Facebook is censoring PragerU videos for violating its speech codes that prohibit so-called “hate speech” and shadow banning its posts, PragerU wrote on Twitter Friday.

“We’re being heavily censored on @Facebook. Our last 9 posts are reaching 0 of our 3 million followers. At least two videos were deleted last night for ‘hate speech’ including our recent video with @ConservativeMillen,” PragerU tweeted.

And then there is the previous Project Veritas sting of Facebook, where it emerged that official company documents said that efforts to censor Republicans was important to do, especially in an election year. That makes it clear that Facebook’s intention is to get the Democrat Party elected.

The previous investigation found this:

Project Veritas has obtained and published documents and presentation materials from a former Facebook insider. This information describes how Facebook engineers plan and go about policing political speech. Screenshots from a Facebook workstation show the specific technical actions taken against political figures, as well as “[e]xisting strategies” taken to combat political speech.

[…]According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution.

Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”

[…]The insider says that unlike many actions that Facebook content moderators can take against pages, the “deboost” action, which appears to occur algorithmically, does not notify the page’s owner.

[…]Upon further review, the insider says she did not notice the tag on any left-wing pages.

Everything that hurts the Democrats is “terrorism” and has to be “de-boosted”, especially “in an election year”.

It’s easy for Big Tech executives to go to Washington and lie about whether their companies are censoring or not, but the evidence speaks for itself. We should be investigating them right now, while we still have the Senate and time before the election. Wake up Republicans! Investigate them and hold them accountable.

YouTube bans video featuring pediatrician who disagrees with transgender activism

Big Tech companies censoring criticism of Democrat policies
Big Tech companies censoring criticism of Democrat policies

On this blog, I’ve been reporting on how big technology companies, many of them based in very liberal Silicon Valley, love to censor anything that makes the Democrat party look bad. Well, the Democrat party has embraced the transgender agenda pretty hard, with the “Equality Act”. So, the Silicon Valley left wants to use their power to censor anything that argues against that agenda.

Consider this article from the Daily Signal:

“See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm, you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.”

Those are the words of Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician with many years’ experience and the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, in a Daily Signal video published in 2017.

It’s a sentence YouTube will not allow the doctor to say about children and gender identity issues.

The Daily Signal recently learned that our video of Cretella had been removed from YouTube. In its place, YouTube displayed this message: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.”

Over the past few months, The Daily Signal worked with YouTube to try to reach a resolution. Ultimately, we were told the only way we could get the video back on YouTube was to delete the previously mentioned sentence.

In other words, we had two choices: censor the doctor’s words or have no video on the world’s biggest video platform.

The parent company of YouTube is Google. Which is why I use the DuckDuckGo search engine.

The Federalist notes:

This is not the first time this has happened to a conservative news outlet or conservative organization. In June, YouTube demonetized comedian Steven Crowder after a pressure campaign by a gay Vox writer. In 2016, YouTube restricted educational videos from the conservative, nonprofit educational organization PragerU. The videos in question included a wide range of subjects from national security and foreign policy, to the Second Amendment and abortion. PragerU ended up suing the Google-owned YouTube for unlawful censorship and free speech discrimination.

This is not a one time occurrence, but a consistent attempt to de-platform conservatives and conservative thought from the largest video platform in the world.

The reason I’m concerned about this is because I keep seeing examples of transgender activists expressing hostility to free speech, and religious liberty. I hope that people are seeing what gay rights really means in practice, and will be appropriately engaged during the 2020 election campaign. There are many ways to help. You can make donations. You can get out the vote. You can put up a yard sign. You can share articles on facts and evidence that are critical of Democrat positions.

If it’s too sensitive for you to argue about social issues like abortion and LGBT activism, then you can share articles critical of socialist policies – about how they require raising taxes, and don’t work. If you want to share articles and evidence about social and moral issues, then it might be a good idea to get yourself an alias, because the left does come after people who disagree with them.

Think about it. We are dealing with people who use power to censor ideas that they disagree with. They don’t want to debate those who disagree, they want to censor them. And if we’ve learned anything about the secular left from history, it’s that if they fail to stop undesired views with censorship, then they resort to violence. The time to stop it is during the election. And the way to stop it is by getting informed, and winning arguments with reason and evidence. Something the left, e.g. – Google and YouTube, is not capable of doing.