Why Did They Censor Another Independent Journalist?
An Independent Journalist, Ford Fischer, had his livestream shut down in the middle of a broadcast for dubious reasons. Its possible it was an accident but the reason given why they deleted his broadcast seems totally incorrect. This isn't the first time Independent media has faced social media censorship and I have to worry that this is part of a trend.
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A couple days ago, we saw Unite the Right 2 take place in Washington, D.C.
One of the independent journalists who was down there is a man named Ford Fisher.
He was livestreaming the entirety of the event, and abruptly, Facebook deleted his livestream and removed the content.
Fortunately, he was able to back the video up.
But when I heard this, I kind of freaked out, because, look, I produce my content mostly for YouTube, but the idea that Facebook would censor a live broadcast from an independent journalist is terrifying.
Now, I don't know exactly why they would take his content down.
They claimed that he was doing some kind of loop, that it was a fake live video.
But his Facebook page is verified.
His Facebook profile is verified.
And he was streaming through the Facebook app.
So, to better understand what's going on today, we're going to talk with Ford Fisher and figure out just why Facebook deleted an independent journalist's live, breaking news coverage on the ground at this rally.
But before we get started, let me give a quick shoutout to today's sponsor, Newsvoice.
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So joining me now is Ford Fisher, who's an independent journalist.
You were on the ground in, I believe you were in Portland and Charlottesville and D.C., is that correct?
Yeah, so that was something that was really weird for me.
I've had a couple times where after filming a live stream, you know, it'll have some kind of an automatic detection, like the activists might have been playing music, and it says, you know, after you've posted the video, like, we think that there is a copyrighted material in it, and then I confirm, no, there's not, and then it stays up or something like that.
So I've had a couple little issues like that before, and then the video stays up.
But in this case, it was really different, because it wasn't after the livestream was done and processed.
Halted the live stream in progress.
It stopped the live stream just with no warning immediately.
And when it did that, it still gave me the ability to save it to my camera roll, so I was able to have a backup.
But I looked at the notification and the reason that it described was blatantly false.
I had thought that maybe they would say that it's hate speech or something like that because I'm filming people who are espousing views that if they themselves were posting it on Facebook, perhaps it would be.
Perhaps it would be You know, censored because they're saying something that Facebook wouldn't want them posting themselves.
Maybe that could be excusable, but Facebook removed it while it was in progress, and the reasoning that it provided was basically that it accused it of not being a live video.
It said that we remove videos that violate our policies by looping, by being static, or by not indicating that they're pre-recorded.
Essentially this would This would apply to if somebody were to put up a live stream of... I've watched this kind of scam happen before, like where somebody will take, you know, body cam footage from a police or military situation and they post it as a live stream so that people think that they're watching a combat situation live without knowing the ending of it.
Right?
That would be deceptive, obviously.
But I was literally live streaming the thing the way that I would any other time.
I film progressive activism.
I film activism from kind of all directions all the time.
And this is the first time that Facebook has ever done this to me, where basically they just got it completely wrong.
They accused me of the video not being sincerely live.
Uh, when it clearly was.
By the way, C-SPAN was also broadcasting this whole thing live, so anybody could easily look at my broadcast and C-SPAN's.
Maybe theirs would look a little higher quality, but you'd essentially be seeing the exact same thing.
I think that the best possible excuse that I can give to Facebook is that maybe There was some kind of coordinated activist attempt to get it down, a no-platforming kind of thing.
Maybe people were reporting it for something that it wasn't doing and then Facebook automatically took it down as a result of being reported so much.
I'm going to leave the possibility open that maybe there could be a mistake to that effect.
But the reality is that no.
I mean, I think that Facebook and social media websites in general have become increasingly uncomfortable with live feeds from these sorts of situations, because there's no way to control that narrative, right?
It's just, here's the thing that's happening, and I think that that kind of competes with the big dollar kinds of outlets that are also using Facebook, CNN, whoever.
And so in a way it might not behoove the people who they're making a lot more money from
in order to allow that kind of content to go.
So, you know, if Facebook wanted to just say, let's just eradicate independent journalists,
and they would just outright say it, it'd probably be better.
But making up completely false excuses, like this live stream isn't actually a live stream.
Uh, I, you know, I don't think that there's any excuse for that.
Yeah, I mean, it's worth noting that I live-streamed a year ago at the original Unite the Right in Charlottesville, and I filmed egregious acts of violence, right, people fighting each other.
I didn't film the exact moment that the car attack happened, but I was around the block, and so essentially I filmed the kind of carnage that came of that, including the death and the attempted revival, but then the death of Heather Hare.
I have livestreamed to Facebook content that is much more disturbing than a handful of fringe political people on a stage at the White House.
So again, it wouldn't seem consistent with it being something about the nature of the content that they would attack this one.
Yeah, well, so I want to point out that Facebook has has never done anything to me, except the one other time that Facebook did it was I actually, because I was getting kind of critical of some of Facebook's policies, I started using Steemit as well, which is kind of an alternative to Facebook.
And it's run on blockchain to be sort of censorship free.
Same with DTube, which is attached to it and kind of the equivalent to YouTube.
I wrote this article basically saying, you know, we can't trust the mainstream social media sources, so I'm posting stuff on an alternative as well.
Facebook marked it as scam, right?
When I posted that article from Steemit, Facebook was calling it scam.
And not just when I posted it, but actually some people were sending me screenshots that when they posted the same article written by me that Facebook was automatically calling it scam as well.
And again, if Facebook doesn't want people posting articles condemning it on their own
social media platform, if that threatens them basically saying, go to our competitor,
you know, I understand why they would be bothered by that.
But again, they should just outright say it not claim that it's that it's scam. In the case of
They don't want to admit that there's a censorship element, that Facebook is uncomfortable with certain types of content being shared on its platform.
And that's something that it's really grappling with right now.
On the YouTube end, I have actually been receiving kind of a wave of demonetizations.
So at this point, I haven't been getting strikes, and I don't believe that my account will be all out banned, but it's become increasingly impossible to glean any meaningful revenue from it.
So basically, automatically, algorithms are kind of depriving it of of monetization, right?
So most of my content, because it's just raw video of news, the majority of the views will happen in the first 24 hours.
So if the content is automatically demonetized, like the second that I post it, and then I appeal it,
and a human may or may not end up actually seeing that to fix the appeal, it almost doesn't matter
because by the time they do it, it's not sort of news anymore.
So that's kind of the problem I've been having with YouTube.
For the past two months, every single video I've produced has been demonetized, except on my second channel.
You know, I launched my second channel and that seems to be okay.
So for whatever reason, I think the algorithms got it out for my channel.
But, it's exactly what you said.
If the video is demonetized immediately, and, like the interview we're doing right now is gonna be live a few hours after I, you know, finish recording and editing this, which is a few hours before everyone, you know, is watching it, there's no money to be made.
Like, this ad revenue can't happen.
Right.
And on top of that, I think, you know, YouTube talks about how they want news, but they keep
promoting mainstream sources that don't actually care about producing anything for YouTube.
They repurpose their existing content, put it on YouTube, and then YouTube says, let's
promote the mainstream instead of our homegrown creators.
Even when it, and what bothers me is, look, I understand they freak out about conspiracy
theory and, you know, fringe weirdos, but you are literally on the ground doing a live
stream, right?
I'm doing a lot of commentary now, but I literally was on the ground in Portland doing a live stream.
My stream kept getting shut off for whatever reason.
They confirmed my live stream demonetized.
It was confirmed by manual review that my live stream of me walking around, mostly just talking to people, should not have ads on it.
And so I end up making, you know, fortunately, Super Chat.
But it seems to me like YouTube, Facebook, these other companies, as much as they might claim they want to clean things up and get good, honest reporting, what they're really saying is just defer to the mainstream media.
Yeah, and I mean, I think that the sad thing about that, like you said, is that when you have the mainstream media, and then they're just posting a clip, here's two minutes of a really interesting thing Wolf Blitzer said to his guest today, right?
If I wanted to watch CNN, I'd watch CNN.
You know, I could go on the cable news, I could watch my television if that's where I wanted to get my news from.
And it's not specifically a condemnation of them, but it's a different platform.
The point of YouTube was this democratization, this decentralization of information.
I mean, I think that was a huge step in sort of human progress and media progress, and I would never have been able to sort of accomplish what I have so far without YouTube.
But it seems like they're kind of going back on their original purpose with that.
In a way, you know, I hate to say it, but it seems like they're selling out.
You know, it's really awesome how people can actually watch this interview we're doing where we discuss the perils of alternative media and how there is a threat facing independent journalists like ourselves.
I recognize that we're able to do what we do because these platforms exist.
And so, you know, people always say to me, oh, Tim, you complain too much about demonetization.
You complain too much about censorship.
You wouldn't even be on that platform if they didn't build it for you.
And I'm like, yeah, no, I get it.
I get it, man.
This is a huge net positive for all of us.
The fact that we can even talk about it is amazing.
But when I bring up these issues, the reason I want to talk to you about it is because they're being threatened.
And if we don't, you know, say, hey, you guys shouldn't be banning.
I mean, look, man, you were literally live streaming a breaking news event.
You had every main, you know, all these big mainstream media companies, not all of them, but they're filming all of it too, much more like in I would argue they're actually filming the rally and taking what this guy's saying.
You're showing the events, you're showing everything.
They're going to take that down for whatever reason.
I want to add to this too.
I don't think, the reason why I don't believe that Facebook accidentally took your live
stream down is because if it was an algorithm, an algorithm better than a human can determine
whether or not a video is on a feedback loop, right?
If it's a fake broadcast.
Their computer knows full well, so here's the thing, when you're doing a live stream,
there's frame rate drop.
When the data can't come in in a perfect stream, it gets chopped up and the app knows to drop
frames so it doesn't lag.
When I think it was YouTube first launched their live streaming on mobile, one of the
problems they had was that it wouldn't drop frames.
It would just clog the pipes.
And so what happened is, over time, the lag would increase to like five minutes.
Seriously, from the point at which you would say hello, five minutes later, the people at home would see it.
Because the app knows how it's receiving this data, which says to me, I can only, look, this is speculation, but I can only assume someone at Facebook said, take this down.
And I've had people say to me that they're not worried about Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or other companies Taking down their content or anything like that because they're like, oh look, you know They're not gonna target me and I said listen man the people running this stuff and Enforcing these rules have politics and their politics vary and I would not be surprised if someone in Silicon Valley Working at Facebook saw your broadcast and said he's platforming these people delete and then the reason they used it was a fake live stream was on purpose because
I think if they claimed it was hate speech or something, there would be a huge story of a journalist filming an event is not hate speech.
But by accusing you of running a recorded video on a loop, they can be like, oh, you know, that's what our system thought it was, and it must have been a mistake.
But either way, they ended your coverage of this event.
I don't want to guess how many times I've live streamed on Facebook, but I'm going to say that it's in the low thousands or very high hundreds.
There is no way that it can be a coincidence, one way or another.
I film people protesting about Trump's immigration policies outside the White House on a weekly basis.
And those are much less exciting, they're much less breaking.
A lot of the time the mainstream media don't show up to those, period, right?
Sometimes I'm the only camera at those events.
Facebook doesn't seem to have any problem with that whatsoever, right?
So the fact that it was this particular, probably the most controversial thing that I'll film this year, the most breaking thing that I'll film this year, that's really in the national ethos, there's no way that that can be a coincidence.
I mean, well, I hate to speak definitively like we know exactly what happened.
We don't know what happened.
But I would say it would be very strange if their computer systems made a mistake considering they know the source of the data is coming from the mobile app.
Come on, man.
I know I can't confirm it because Facebook's not going to tell me, but Facebook knows where the content they're receiving, where it's coming from, be it a computer, a broadcasting software, or a phone.
It's worth noting that some live streamers will feed it through some kind of third-party application that allows them to Split the feed so that it's going on to like Periscope, Facebook, and YouTube at the same time or something like that.
I'm literally just on the Facebook app, right?
So, I mean, Facebook's tracking my position.
Facebook could easily see, for example, that I was in Lafayette Park at the moment that they killed it, right?
I was exactly where the thing was taking place, right?
There's absolutely zero ambiguity, I guess, about that that Facebook possibly could have had with the amount of data it collects.
Well, anyway, I think we sort of beat the horse to death on the issue, but before we take off, do you want to add anything about, you know, censorship, social media stuff?
I know Alex Jones getting banned is a huge issue.
There's like a big activist campaign on Twitter right now where all these celebrities and high-profile individuals are threatening to, you know, deactivate their accounts.
Like, I guess we'll just end off on, do you have any thoughts you want to add on the idea of speech and expression on these platforms?
I don't think it's about any particular sort of one person.
I mean, I think that it's just kind of a larger trend where some of these platforms are starting to scale back that exact democratization, that exact decentralization that made them so great in the first place.
And I think that, in a way, it's a if-you-don't-use-it-you-lose-it sort of situation.
So I've seen some people do a campaign.
I know there's an activist slash journalist named Adam Kokash who did I don't use that strategy.
In my opinion, it's important to continue using it and fight till the end, but point out the censorship as it's happening.
the exact same post saying why he's not posting on Facebook anymore. It's
basically the same complaints that we're talking about here today. I don't use
that strategy. In my opinion it's important to continue using it and fight
till the end, but point out the censorship as it's happening. Show that
decline so that when Tim Pool is removed from YouTube or when Ford
Fisher and News2Share are removed from Facebook or something like that, you'll
You'll have thousands of people who are watching that content and say, Facebook, what the hell?
This isn't acceptable.
And I think the fact that that could happen might be all that stands in the way of it happening.
You know, when I saw the post about what happened, it was actually Emily, who works with me, was like, dude, did you see that Facebook took down his livestream?
And I was like, no way.
That can't be true.
And then I saw it.
So I think it's important we bring this stuff up.
Again, for everybody watching, I'm not saying that these platforms are Terrible.
By no means.
But I'm saying we should be vigilant and make sure we know what's happening, when it's happening, why it's happening, and we need to make sure everybody knows that this kind of stuff is happening.
So if we need an exodus, you know, if at some point we realize YouTube, Facebook, whatever isn't an option, you know, we'll find some alternatives.
So, Ford, thanks for hopping on and I'll talk to you soon.
So I think I articulated myself for the most part throughout that video.
You know, we don't know exactly what happened.
Suffice it to say that his video was taken down.
And it's alarming when we see this kind of censorship, be it accidental or intentional.
If it's true that Facebook took it down on purpose, that's terrifying.
It's terrifying for all of us who are on alternative media trying to get our information from a multitude of sources.
And if it was an accident, I'd argue it might actually be even more terrifying, that their systems can't tell the difference between their own app and a fake live video being pushed through their servers, and that means there's no one to complain to, and there's no one to fix the problem.
If we just hand over our alternative platforms to robots, to technology, to try and solve the problem, they're not gonna understand context, and things are just gonna get worse.
So, anyway, thanks for sticking around.
I think it's really important we talk about this stuff, so let me know what you think in the comments below.
Do you think Facebook did this on purpose?
I kinda do.
I'm not saying that I can prove it or confirm it or anything like that, but I feel like that... I just personally believe that it was intentional.
But comment.
Let me know what you think.
We'll keep the conversation going.
Stay tuned.
New videos every day at 4 p.m.
I'm gonna have more videos up on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNews, starting at 6 p.m.
