Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook censors criticism of Democrat Party, especially before “important elections”

Big social media companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter are very open about censoring and shadow-banning conservative voices. These companies do not support free speech or ideological diversity. They are careful to hire only those who share their secular leftism and fascism. But sometimes, one accidentally hires a non-fascist, and we get a glimpse at the internal workings of company.

Here’s Project Veritas, doing the journalism that the mainstream media won’t do:

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.”

Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s page had been suppressed before in April 2016, and Crowder told Project Veritas they settled a dispute related to the issue with Facebook out of court. Asked for comment on this story, Steven Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond said:

“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”

A screenshot of an action log on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page provided by the insider, shows the tag. The insider believes that the “deboost” code suppresses the distribution of livestream videos on Facebook. Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.

When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just “make stuff up” about people through these systems. “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” said Cernovich.

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.

Here’s a screencap of one the documents that was leaked:

Facebook doesn't want people to see conservative videos
Facebook doesn’t want people to see conservative videos

So, the question is, what is that “example video”, which Facebook says is “troll behavior” that must be censored? Well, it’s a video produced by a mainstream conservative journalist who works for The Blaze, a mainstream conservative news site:

The video linked in the presentation was made by Lauren Chen, a conservative commentator who now hosts a program on BlazeTV. “If you actually watch the video you can see that it clearly isn’t abusive or promoting harassment, the video was a criticism of social justice,” said Chen when asked for comment on this story. She added that “the video actually promotes equality and individualism.”

What’s the purpose of all of this censorship? Why, to suppress conservative voices before important elections, of course:

Yamamoto and de la Rubia’s presentation says that “troll accounts,” can have their internet bandwidth limited and experience forced glitches like frequent “auto-logout[s]” and the failed upload of comments. These “special features” would be triggered “leading up to important elections.”

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has been caught censoring conservatives in order to help their allies in the Democrat Party.

Remember this story about Franklin Graham?

Facebook banned Franklin Graham for "hate speech"
Facebook banned Franklin Graham for “hate speech”

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 and called the 24-hour ban a mistake that it had already undone. 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.

A spokesman for Facebook told the Charlotte Observer on condition of anonymity that the review team had decided a 2016 post violated rules against “dehumanizing language” and exclusion of people based on, among other things, sexual orientation and gender self-identification. The post was deleted and Mr. Graham prevented from using the service for 24 hours.

I guess Facebook thinks that anyone who is serious about Christianity needs to be “de-boosted”, i.e. – have their free speech censored by fascists on the secular left.

And what about this article 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.

The official PragerU Facebook page is still up on Facebook at the time of publication. Its Facebook page reposts the same videos consistently and others can still be found on the page.

However, it appears that one specific PragerU social media administrator — the one who posted the videos that Facebook considered violated its “hate speech” policies — is unable to post on behalf of PragerU, resulting only other PragerU administrators being able to see the post. No one else can see the posts.

What kind of people work at Facebook? They are not moral people. They do not understand basic human rights. They do not respect free speech and they don’t value diversity of opinion. They are ignorant, intolerant, close-minded, bigoted fascists.

Spotify joins Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter in censoring Prager University

Prager University explains the central insights of the conservative worldview
Prager University explains the central insights of the conservative worldview

Have you ever wondered who is doing a good job of countering the lies of the secular left? Alliance Defending Freedom does a good job on defense at the Supreme Court, but who is on offense, changing the culture? I think one answer that no one would disagree with is Prager University.

Certainly, the secular leftists in Big Technology agree, which is why they keep censoring Prager University videos and ads.

The Daily Caller explains:

Music-streaming platform Spotify removed PragerU’s advertisements from its platform, noting the content does not comply with the company’s editorial policies, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

“Our policy team has re-reviewed the ads that you have submitted through Ad Studio and determined that the content of the ads do not comply with our editorial policies,” Spotify noted in an email to PragerU.

[…]“Our policy team has made the decision to stop all existing ads and not approve new ads coming through in the future. Please let us know if you have any questions or require further clarification,” the email adds.

Most of the ads are tame and direct listeners to click on the conservative group’s website to learn more about “intersectionality” and other social issues.

PragerU frequently complains about censorship on YouTube and other social media platforms. The group filed a lawsuit in 2017 against Google and Google-owned YouTube, alleging unlawful censorship.

[…]Spotify has not yet responded to TheDCNF’s repeated requests for comment about the nature of the ads or the reason for the expulsion.

Censorship is nothing new to big technology companies like Google. They have enormous problems dealing with intellectual diversity, because their secular left worldview is not supportive of diversity and inclusion. They literally can’t stand to hear ideas expressed that are different from their own, and they’re not afraid to use force to silence or coerce those who disagree with them.

Google believes in censorship so much that they are developing a search engine for China that censors any content that the atheistic regime decides is objectionable. China is famous for being massive human rights violators, and they are currently cracking down on religious liberty, especially for Christians. I would imagine that Google, being a left-wing fascistic company, is sympathetic with these goals. These big tech companies are run by secular leftists, and so they are not very different in their beliefs and goals from other secular leftist totalitarians throughout history. Atheists don’t have a rational basis for human rights like free speech, freedom of religion, the right to life and freedom of association.

I thought it might be a good idea for me to post a few of my favorite Prager University videos.

Antonia Okafor:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Christina Hoff Sommers:

Allie Stuckey:

Dave Rubin:

So, there you have four videos with women – two of whom were non white. And the last is Dave Rubin who is gay! But every video taught the basics of the conservative position on different issues. Still, the secular left has to censor all of these videos, because they disagree with this speech.

It’s a good idea for you to follow Prager University on Facebook and Twitter, but also bookmark their main site. Their main site cannot be censored by the big secular left tech companies.

Facebook bans Franklin Graham for “hate speech”, Google YouTube shadow-bans pro-life videos

Facebook banned Franklin Graham for "hate speech"
Facebook banned Franklin Graham for posting “hate speech”

There were some really interesting stories of censorship by big technology on the weekend. First story is about famous Christian pastor and evangelist Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham. Facebook didn’t like what he shared, so they decided to ban him from their platform.

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 and called the 24-hour ban a mistake that it had already undone. 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.

A spokesman for Facebook told the Charlotte Observer on condition of anonymity that the review team had decided a 2016 post violated rules against “dehumanizing language” and exclusion of people based on, among other things, sexual orientation and gender self-identification. The post was deleted and Mr. Graham prevented from using the service for 24 hours.

I was thinking about this story when another news story popped up, this one about a transgender woman (a biological man) who screamed obscenities and treatened violence against a male store clerk and a female customer at a GameStop store.

Here’s the video: (WARNING: AWFUL VULGAR LANGUAGE)

And the story was reported by Daily Wire:

The video starts with the trans individual cussing out the male GameStop clerk after being offered store credit rather than a refund.

“I don’t want credit, you’re going to give me my f***ing money back,” the customer yells.

A woman not in the view of the camera took issue with the trans person’s vulgar language.

“Excuse me, sir, there’s a young man in here — you need to watch your mouth,” she says in a calm voice.

The trans person instantly becomes aggressive, screaming, “Excuse me — it is ma’am! It is ma’am!”

“I’m sorry. I can call the police if you’d like me to. You need to settle down,” the woman responds, keeping her calm tone.

“You need to settle down!” the enraged customer screams back at her, pointing at her face. “You need to settle down and mind your business!”

The trans person then turns to the clerk: “Ma’am! Once again: ma’am!”

“I said, ‘both of you,'” contends the young employee.

“No, you said, ‘sir’; once again, it’s ma’am!” the trans person screams in response, before threatening to fight him. “Mother f***er! Take it outside! You wanna call me ‘sir’ again? I will show you a f***ing sir!”

The aggressive customer then kicks downs products in the store and walks toward the exit door, but then turns back around.

[…]”I plan on telling the entire LGBTQ community,” he tells the employee. “You’re going to lose money over this.”

Indeed, anyone who disagrees with the LGBTQ community will lose money over it. And maybe even their means of earning money, too. That’s the way things are going these days, and the big technology companies certainly agree with punishing the wicked for their “hate speech”.

Meanwhile, over at YouTube, which is owned by Google, pro-life videos are being shadow-banned, because a pro-abortion journalist complained that she didn’t like seeing pro-life material in her search results.

The Daily Wire reports:

After a reporter from the leftist site Slate contacted YouTube, complaining that search results when using the term “abortion” featured a plethora of videos that were anti-abortion, including some from the pro-life group Live Action and others featuring staunch pro-life advocate Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, suddenly the platform reputedly reflected a change with more videos featured that were pro-abortion or simply not pro-life.

On December 23, Shapiro’s various videos were found behind at least 40 others; videos from Live Action, whose videos have garnered over 140 million views, were far beyond the 150th video to be seen.

April Glaser, writing for Slate, trumpeted her part in effecting the apparent change at YouTube. She started by comparing the results of conducting a search for “abortion” on Google as opposed to YouTube:

When you Google “abortion,” the top results are relatively staid considering the divisiveness of the topic in American life. There’s a link to information about the procedure from Planned Parenthood, a Google map of nearby abortion providers, a link to an overview of anti-abortion and pro-choice arguments from the nonpartisan procon.org, and links to various news sources like the New York Times and the New Yorker.

Glaser writes that she emailed YouTube on December 14 complaining about the search results, and voila! She wrote on December 21, “By the end of this week, the top results (which are dynamic) included a news segment in Tamil, a video in which the director Penny Marshall (who died this week) ‘Opens Up on Drugs and Her Abortion,’ and a clip of an anti-abortion advocate responding to the abortion-legalization law passed in Ireland. Anti-abortion content meant to enrage or provoke viewers was no longer purely dominating the results, though they still looked very different from the generally more sober Google results.”

So, if you’re wondering how the big Silicon Valley / Seattle technology companies work, it’s simple. If you disagree with their far-left socially progressive agenda, then they either ban you outright, or they drop your content down in their search results.

Google’s censorship of Wintery Knight

In my own case, the number of Google search referrals from this blog has dropped 90% since Google lost the 2016 election to Trump. That’s when Google decided to get serious about censoring my content and dropping it in their search results. Once upon a time, Google would send me 1000 search referrals for every 1 sent by DuckDuckGo. But now, DuckDuckGo is sending me more search referrals than Google. If I search for keywords I’ve written about, my results are far, far back in Google’s search results. But on Duck Duck Go, my blog is usually in the top 10. My friends have verified this.

If you haven’t tried DuckDuckGo, please give it a try, and switch. They are now using Bing for maps, and Yelp for store reviews. The search results are more accurate than Google’s biased results.