I saw this on Gab this morning.
Ms. Attkisson’s post is about being temporarily suspended on Facebook because she posted an accurate quote from an historical figure. She notes that she is being punished while certain Facebook users are routinely allowed post false information without any consequences.
Facebook is indeed an Orwellian operation—it follows the principle that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Facebook is promoting a documentary series called 9 Months with Courteney Cox—
This is yet another reason to avoid Facebook.
Facebook has been blocking links to Hogewash! for a bout a year. Recently, they stated that the reason someone could not post a link to Hogewash! was because of spam. I contacted Facebook demanding that they either provide evidence of a connection between this site and spam by close of business Eastern Time yesterday or that they cease and desist from blocking links to Hogewash!.
I received no response from Facebook. However, when one of the Gentle Readers attempted to link to a post yesterday evening, he received this notice—
I am not amused.
Susan Crabtree has an article over at RCP titled Group of Tech Execs Takes On Social Media Censorship. It takes a look at what may be going on behind the scenes in Silicon Valley related to Facebook’s recent uncensoring of discussion about the possibility of a lab leak being the source of the recent pandemic from the point of view of Mike Matthys, a venture capital executive. She also cites Matthys’ criticism of Facebook’s censorship relating to a Wall Street Journal review of a book on climate change, YouTube’s suppression of a video about the efficacy of masks and lockdowns by Gov. DeSantis and physicians from Stanford and Harvard, and an attempt by Reps. Eshoo (D-CA) and McNerney (D-CA) to pressure media companies.
[P]olitically biased censorship only further fuels widespread mistrust in the media writ large – especially when they suddenly reverse course and lift bans on certain narratives that subsequent evidence shows weren’t crackpot ideas at all.
Many of the Titans of Tech have become intoxicated with their success to date. They’ve become legends in their own minds, and that has led them to overreach. Hubris invariably attracts Nemesis.
Hogewash! is very tiny slice of the overall media pie, but it has been the a victim of social media censorship. In 2015, my blog and I were banned from Twitter because truthful reporting was deemed to be targeted harassment. That was very early in Twitter’s campaign to control The Narrative, and the company wound up restoring one of my accounts. However, Twitter has applied some of the lessoned learned dealing with accounts like mine to refine their censorship methods and try to keep them within the Section 230 safe harbor.
About a year ago, I began receiving emails and comments saying that Facebook was not permitting users to post links to Hogewash! because this site violated Facebook’s “community standards.” Given Facebook’s behavior with regard to free speech, I took that as a badge of honor, and late in 2020, I closed my own Facebook account. Last month, I received an email from one of the Gentle Readers with a copy of a notice he received when he tried to link to a post at Hogewash!. This notice gave a more specific reason for banning links to Hogewash!—it claimed this site is a source of spam.
I have asked Facebook to provide me with any evidence they have connecting this site with spam by close of business today.
The Department of Justice has filed suit against Facebook. It’s not some sort of antitrust action. It’s not about illegal in-kind campaign donations. It’s about illegal employment practices. Specifically, Facebook is accused of illegally discrimination in hiring against qualified American and of hiring temporary immigrants with H1B visas instead.
Commenting on the suit, Eric S Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division said, “Our message to all employers—including those in the technology sector—is clear: You cannot illegally prefer to recruit, consider, or hire temporary visa holders over US workers.”
It’s rarely an obvious fault that finally trips up the self-important. The Gentle Reader may remember that Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion.
I’ve just hit the DELETE button on my Facebook account. I wasn’t really using it, and attempts by other users to link to posts here at Hogewash! are being blocked because Facebook has determined that this site is offensive. While I’ve referred to being censored by Facebook as a badge of honor, I’ve decided it makes no sense to be where I’m not welcome. I’ve pulled the plug.
I’m still on social media. You can find my wjjhoge accounts on Gab (I’m a minor shareholder), Parler, MeWe, and Twitter.
From Twitter on our iPhones to Facebook on our laptops, a silicon curtain has descended across the face of the Internet. Behind it lie all the media outlets and individuals engaged in fair reporting. The NY Post and all its readers are but one example of those who suffer from what I must call Progressive censorship, and all of us are subject to one form or another of Progress influence over what we may hear and say, increasingly under the control of Silicon Valley.
BuzzFeed has a post up titled Facebook’s Preferential Treatment Of US Conservatives Puts Its Fact-Checking Program In Danger.
BTW, Hogewash! is one of the websites that Facebook censors. I’m informed that users have not been allowed to link to my posts.
When most of us think about cyber warfare, we probably have hacking or malware attacks in mind. But what about using blocking and censorship to control the flow of information?
Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other private actors are essentially engaging in a form of private cyber warfare by deplatforming accounts that they view as politically incorrect, and they’ve been relying on the protections afforded by U. S. law to get away with it. But these American companies operate on the worldwide web, and no other country’s laws provide the protection they enjoy here. Some of those countries which we normally think of as democracies are considering giving the mainstream social media sites a dose of their own medicine.
Stephen Michael Kellat has an interesting piece over at Coyote Works about the cyber war that is brewing between Facebook and several countries (New Zealand in particular) and the possible economic fallout. It’s been suggested that countries having problems with Facebook or other social networks should consider nation-level blocking so that local alternatives might develop.
A cyber war need not be kinetic and appears to be shaping up as economic in nature. Currently the stock market is driven hard by the FAANG group of stocks which stands generally for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Out of those five companies, one produces physical goods to purchase and one is a retailer. The other three produce electronic intangibles for a global market. If the United States gets hit with what would effectively be targeted economic sanctions towards a specific company that may have offended local sensibilities, how are we going to react?
Blocking Instapundit or Legal Insurrection may not move the needle much on the national economy. Blocking Facebook would appear to cause a bit of a plunge, though. A multilateral blockade of one web property to essentially quarantine it would be a fairly drastic action.
Read the whole thing.
The Daily Caller has a post up providing details of two fake ad campaigns on Facebook that were designed to suppress Republican turnout during the 2018 elections.
Democratic operatives funded by left-wing tech billionaire Reid Hoffman ran a widespread campaign using misleading Facebook pages in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, The Daily Caller News Foundation has found.
American Engagement Technologies (AET), which was founded by former Obama administration official Mikey Dickerson, bought ads for two Facebook pages, “The Daily Real” and “Today’s Nation,” encouraging Republican voters to stay home in the midterm elections, Facebook’s ad archives show.
AET provided funding for the Alabama Dry fake Facebook campaign that targeted Republican candidate Roy Moore during a 2017 special senatorial election. It’s beginning to appear that Alabama Dry was a dry run of a larger election interference scheme.
On Monday, WaPo reported that another Hoffman-funded operation called News for Democracy was running an anti-Trump campaign of Facebook. News for Democracy’s violations included coordinated efforts to mislead people about the origin of their ad content.
No one from Protect Our Elections/EMPR Inc. has been available for comment.
David French has a post over at NRO taking note of a weed sprouting in the Progressive monoculture. A Facebook engineer named Brian Amerige has started a group called “FB’ers for Political Diversity,” and around a hundred of his colleagues at the company have joined. Not a huge number for a company that size, but enough for there to be some safety because of the size of the group. Of course, the internal SJW mob at Facebook is complaining, but so far, they’ve been told that the group has not violated any company rules.
Even one dissenting voice in a room can alter the entire dynamic of the conversation and moderate the whole. The lack of any dissenting voices naturally and inevitably causes the group to migrate to the extremes. The resulting extremism further deters dissent and fosters even more extremism — to the point where the received wisdom of the in-group can seem utterly mystifying to outsiders.
With all due apologies to the Harry Potter franchise, if Amerige can become “the engineer who lived” — the man who dissented, gathered a coalition, and made a difference — then his influence won’t be limited to Facebook (and given Facebook’s power, even if he “only” influences Facebook, he’ll have made an impact); it will extend throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.
Reform from the inside is typically more consequential and durable than reform imposed from the outside. And now we have evidence — from the heart of a social-media giant — that the monoculture may see a challenge. The monoculture is facing a threat, and that is good news indeed for America’s embattled culture of free speech.
Read the whole thing.
From my point of view, it’s the SJW monoculture that’s the weeds. Those lone plants look like roses to me.
As Michelle Malkin points out at in a piece over at Real Clear Politics, that used to be Twitter’s motto. For all I know, it may still formally be that company’s motto, but they have clearly abandoned it. As an early member of the growing group of conservatives and libertarians who have been suspended from Twitter, I can personally testify to that company’s unwillingness to treat those of us on the right fairly. It seems evident to me that I was suspended in 2015 in support of a bogus peace order petition filed against me and that my account was restored after I won the case and had grounds to engage in legal discovery. It seems to take that sort of hammer to force Twitter “Safety” to treat a conservative safely. Indeed, Twitter’s CEO has admitted the company’s left-wing bias.
The “new” war on conservatives on the internet is the same old attempt by desperate liberals to shut down their competitors in the marketplace of ideas. If you can’t beat ’em, deplatform ’em. That’s the progressive way.
The right-wing solution is not to lie down, but to win over more converts, find new ways to disseminate our news and views, and turn up the heat.
Read the whole thing.
Almost without exception, the Main Stream Social Media are suppressing the free exchange of ideas by conservatives and libertarians. However, most ISPs are still tolerant of us. We should turn that to our advantage. A decade ago, it wasn’t social media that ruled the flow of ideas on the Internet. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have become chokepoints. We should stop routing our traffic through them or at least begin using parallel paths as well. (e.g., get on Gab.)
But we should also use the good tools we have on hand, and one of those is blogging.
Support the bloggers whose work you find interesting or enjoyable. Link to them. Tell your friends about them. Hit their tip jars. As my former codefendant says,
In the competition of ideas, you can’t win the game if you’re not on the playing field.
Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes have kicked Alex Jones off of their platforms. If those editorial decisions had been based on the vileness of some of the ranting on InfoWars, they would have been in line with my decision here at Hogewash! to ignore Jones as much as possible. But they don’t seem to be. They seem to be based on appeasing a social media mob.
Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook are private companies and are entitled to make decisions about how they wish to operate. They may view banning InfoWars as a good business decision or as a proper moral act. However, as operators of large swaths of what has become the world’s public square, they have a moral responsibility to maximize access to the venues they operate. As American companies in that public square, they have a social (but not legal) responsibility to maximize free speech. If those responsibilities are at odds with their corporate goals, they should exit that part of the market.
A case can be reasonably argued that Alex Jones has overstepped the boundaries of free speech. Indeed, there are defamation lawsuits pending against him. Banning him for such defamation could be proper. Banning him for being politically incorrect might be legal, but it would likely be at odds with American society’s traditional support for free speech.
UPDATE—David French offers a better explanation of my points here (at the NYT of all places!).
Prof. Reynold’s offers these comments at Instapundit—
A few points: (1) This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all. (2) Aside from its free-speech* implications, which are serious indeed, this also looks like an antitrust violation: Media companies, which compete with Jones for eyeballs, colluded to get other media companies to shut him down. Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit. This is more than arguably conspiracy in restraint of trade (and possibly a conspiracy to deprive him of civil rights). (3) This is proof that we need to break up these big tech companies, which exercise way too much power via their near-monopolies. That they coordinate in the abuse of those monopolies only makes it clearer.
* Note that I say “free speech” and not “First Amendment.” The First Amendment only limits government, but “free speech” is — or at least until very recently was — a broader social value in favor of not shutting people up just because we don’t like their ideas or politics. As for the “private companies can do what they want,” well, that’s not the law, or the custom, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s especially not true where the companies have, as these companies have, affirmatively represented to users and shareholders that they don’t discriminate based on viewpoints.
UPDATE 2—Jonah Goldberg adds this at NRO—
But part of the problem is that platforms such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. operate almost like public utilities. Indeed that’s one of the ironies about the battle lines drawn over Alex Jones. As a broad generalization, the people who loved net neutrality, precisely because they want the Internet to be like a public utility, cheered Big Internet for banning Jones from its platforms. Meanwhile, many of the people who hated net neutrality were outraged by the idea that private companies could “censor” voices they didn’t like. A real public utility can’t deny services to customers just because it doesn’t like what they say or think.
One of the reasons I didn’t like net neutrality is that when you treat private enterprises like corporatist partners of the state, they become corporatist partners of the state. I don’t want the government to be invested in any private business for a host of reasons, not least among them: because the state will never stop attaching more strings to their symbiotic relationship. Another reason: Such public-private partnerships are problematic in any economic realm, but they are particularly pernicious when issues of political speech are involved. Also: They are inherently monopolistic insofar as the state becomes invested in the entities it controls and seeks to protect them from the creative destruction of the market. I want to live in a country where Google and Facebook can be rendered obsolete by something better, without the state rushing to their rescue.
When Italy adopted that sort of state corporatism, they called it Fascism.
TechDirt reports that Facebook algorithms took down WordPress’s lawyer’s post about the idiocy of algorithmic takedowns.
John Hinderacker writes over at PowerLine about Facebook refusing an ad.
Are Facebook employees refusing, in some instances, to “boost” posts that include non-leftist points of view? I would hardly have thought it possible, in part because we have successfully boosted a number of posts that obviously had a conservative slant. But this experience leaves me wondering what other explanation there could be for Facebook’s spiking of our ad. Maybe this is one more situation where paranoia is justified.
Read the whole thing.
Lawerence Kudlow explains why over at Real Clear Politics in a piece about the site’s anti-conservative bias and how Mark Zuckerberg is trying to spin that story.
Of course, Facebook is a private company, and therefore is entitled to whatever political biases it holds. But given its gigantic scope and its power over so many people, and considering the mounting influence of all the social-media outlets, this is a very serious story.
We’ll see what comes out of Wednesday’s meeting. But as the American proverb goes: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Read the whole thing.
Gizmodo has a story up quoting former Facebook workers as saying they were directed to kill stories of interest to conservative readers from the site’s “trending” news section.
Also breaking: A bear was found relieving itself in the forest.
Facebook is great for looking up people you used to know, and being reassured they still live six states away.
—James Lileks
I now have Facebook and Twitter accounts.