Censorship BACKFIRES On Far Left AGAIN, But They STILL Demand More
Censorship BACKFIRES On Far Left AGAIN, But They STILL Demand More. A left wing activists reporter was suspended on Twitter for posting an image of a "right wing" personality. This is something we see over and over.The people calling for these new social media censorship rules are the ones who keep hearing "dog whistles" and calling them out. But context is irrelevant to a robot or someone not familiar with our culture so like clockwork these same activists get banned for talking about it.Meanwhile those who are truly vile will just change how they speak and stop posting certain images meaning.When the far left social justice types demand censorship of these people in all likelihood it will be THEM getting censored. While conservatives are more likely to get banned in most cases we often see the same activists who demand social media censorship hit with their own rulesAnd even though it KEEPS Happening they don't learn.
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The other day, a left-wing activist reporter was suspended on Twitter for posting an image of a controversial right-wing figure holding a Confederate flag.
The goal was to show who the person was and what they were standing behind.
Unfortunately, that's now apparently against the rules.
And it's a very similar story to something we heard from the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this month.
One of their reporters was covering white nationalism, posted some images which contained a symbol associated with white nationalism, and got locked out of their account as well.
There are many people on the left calling for censorship.
The Russiagators are saying we have to restrict Russian influence.
We then see anti-war media, Mafic media, get suspended.
We hear people saying that fake news must be stopped, and then Alternet and Democracy Now get deranked in Google, and then you have those on the left saying we must ban hate speech, and it results in reporters and activists getting suspended.
What's interesting is that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is impacted by these rules, is a part of a group called Change the Terms, which wants these platforms to be more proactive in banning people.
According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The left frequently does call it censorship.
Unfortunately, it is a minority position among the left to actually challenge these ideas and most mainstream individuals and organizations support the idea.
Today, let's take a look at what happened with this latest censorship and we'll go through just how bad it's getting and how it's impacting even political campaigns.
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Very early this morning, we saw a tweet from Michael Edison Hayden, who is the senior investigative reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
He said, Twitter again locked out Sandy Bacombe.
This time, she posted a pic of Trump supporter and local swastika enthusiast Joe Vival.
Twitter, cracking down on an independent journalist covering the far right, is striking given
how many open racists are on here.
What are they doing?
In the image we can see what appears to be an email from Sandy where she said,
I got locked out of my account for posting this picture and saying Trump supporters like Robert
E. Lee too. What the F is going on? And we can see this image of her account being suspended.
It says this account is temporarily restricted.
After activist outcry, Sandy was restored, saying, I'm back. Thanks, Michael E. Hayden. I think it's a combo
of people weaponizing Twitter in mass reports and the algorithm,
which means there are certain subjects I can't report on, certain words I can't use.
And of course, Sandy is 100% correct. In this story from Michael Hayden, April 5th,
Twitter locked me out of my account for reporting on extremists.
The story from Hayden highlights how the social media giant locked him out and threatened him with a permanent suspension for posting a tweet that demonstrates a connection between an American white supremacist leader, the terrorists who gunned down 50 worshippers in New Zealand, and a mysterious fire that recently ravaged a Tennessee-based building linked to the civil rights movement.
One of the biggest problems with groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and people like Michael Hayden Is that they actively campaign for these rules, but then complain when those rules are enforced.
In his pinned tweet, he says, There is no nuanced or balanced view to have about the
ideology of white supremacy, period.
White supremacists are murdering people.
The time for Twitter to get serious about moderating this platform is right now.
Twitter is.
They're getting rid of white supremacist imagery.
That means reporters will be banned, too.
The rules are not that specific.
Of course, they were shocked to find the rules would be applied to them.
But it's so strange to see the SPLC reporter's Twitter account that simultaneously says, ban white supremacy, and then don't ban people who are posting white supremacist imagery.
It doesn't matter if they're reporting on it or not.
The rules are clear.
The rules you campaign for.
Now, of course, the rules shouldn't function this way.
It's one thing to support a group and another thing to report on a group, but that's context that will require a human being.
And human beings can't moderate all of Twitter.
There are too many posts.
In fact, some humans don't even understand context.
Which means you may get a human, and they might say, is this person pretending to oppose this?
Or are they supporting it?
And more importantly, that loophole will just allow actual white supremacists to claim they're not supporting it, they're just letting you know.
Who then gets banned?
If you want it banned, you will be banned too.
But of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center is part of a group called Change the Terms.
White supremacists are using online platforms for hate.
It's time to change the terms.
And we can see these are the groups who have come together to form the Change the Terms Coalition, which ironically includes the Free Press, who claims to champion an open and free internet while simultaneously arguing in favor of censorship.
Glenn Greenwald, back in August, made a very important point about this.
He said, quote, When we said we wanted Silicon Valley giants to censor content, we didn't mean this content.
The inevitable lament of every censorship advocate who somehow convinced themselves that bad, powerful actors will censor in accordance with their benevolent political agendas and views.
And of course, two days later, Glenn Greenwald was proven right.
This post from Fair and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive media watchdog, said that Facebook will turn to censoring the left isn't a worry, it's a reality.
In the story, they say, on August 6, a number of giant online media companies, including Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and Pinterest, took the seemingly coordinated decision to remove all content from Alex Jones and his media outlet InfoWars from their platforms.
The story goes on to be very critical of Jones and the things he pushes, but then says, The reaction from the media to the decision to ban Jones and InfoWars was largely celebratory.
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert joked that it looked like InfoWars just lost their war on info.
The Daily Beast urged readers to shed absolutely no tears for Alex Jones, while Salon and CNN put pressure on Twitter to follow suit, with the former asking, why is Alex Jones still allowed on Twitter?
Some worried about a slippery slope of corporate censorship riding in Rolling Stone.
Matt Taibbi warned, the endgame here couldn't be clearer.
This is how authoritarian marriages begin and people should be very worried.
Yet this appeared to be a minority opinion.
Media critic and news presenter David Dole shared his message to progressives via Twitter.
Lefties defending Alex Jones right now, I hear you.
On the surface, it appears to set bad precedent to give massive corporations control over who's silenced.
But if you aren't performing hate speech, libel, or slander on a regular basis, then I don't know what you're worried about.
They go on to say that unfortunately, Facebook immediately used this new precedent to switch its sights on the left.
Temporarily shutting down the Occupy London page, and deleting the anti-fascist NoUniteTheRight account.
Furthermore, on August 9th, the independent, reader-supported news website, Venezuela Analysis, had its page suspended without warning.
A more recent story from FAIR highlights how in 2017, a number of publications often critical of Western policy, Alternet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now, Common Dreams, Global Research, and Truthapp, among others, claimed that their Google-directed traffic sank as much as 63% in the wake of a Google algorithm change designed to bust the ill-defined specter of fake news.
Simultaneously, many of corporate media's heavy hitters, namely the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, appeared to have been spared.
But to answer the question from David Dole, what are you really worried about?
He claims if you're not performing hate speech, libel, or slander, then you're fine.
Unfortunately, highlighting someone else's hate speech to report on it Is, in fact, still hate speech.
The ultimate ramifications are obvious, as I just highlighted.
But in this tweet from a couple days ago, Ben Norton said, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, just shut down the
massive channel used by Spain's independent leftist political party, Podemos. And it did
this just days before the general election.
This is actual extreme election meddling by a foreign corporation.
As FAIR points out, there are people on the left who are calling out censorship, but unfortunately, it is a minority position.
Because as I showed you in the beginning, a left-wing activist reporter was locked out of their account for reporting on an individual, And the person who is highlighting this from the SPLC simultaneously calls for this suspension while trying to argue that they shouldn't be suspended.
Twitter is not going to care why or how you're posting this.
In this instance, they did release the account.
And they did the same for the writer when it happened to him.
But in the end, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook care about advertisers.
They want to avoid controversy.
That means if you are reporting on this, you will get banned.
And guess what?
The actual white supremacists will just avoid using certain words and they will not be banned.
You are quite literally advocating only for the banning of yourselves.
Sure, some far-right white nationalist Nazi types won't be able to post their images, but they don't have to.
They can spread their ideas in other ways.
As long as you advocate to change the terms, it will be you who is censored.
It is the most insane thing ever, but I gotta say it.
The left advocating for this, they're doing everything they can to actually protect the fringe neo-Nazi white nationalist types who are going to be able to operate with impunity on these platforms, while anyone who tries to prove that they're part of these groups, they're the ones who are going to be banned for it.
Unfortunately, it ends up hitting actual journalists, not political activists.
Jake Hanrahan tweeted this morning, I had my account held ransom by Twitter for doing my job.
Jake Hanrahan made a post about a neo-Nazi mass shooter, covering a story that he frequently reports on, and he had his account locked.
Jake Hanrahan reports on conflict.
He's reported on the far left.
He's reported on the far left committing crimes.
He's reported on the far right and the far right committing crimes.
He's just doing journalism.
And journalism, real journalism, is going to be shut down because of these people demanding these bans.
In a rather ironic turn, it hits them first.
It's a really strange phenomenon to see story after story and even data sets published in Quillette proving That Twitter is biased against the right, where you can see in their rules they ban misgendering trans people, which is something the conservatives do not align with ideologically.
Yet they will claim over and over again.
From the Hill, evidence contradicts right-wing narrative of tech censorship and bias.
It's an opinion piece.
It's actually not true.
The story from The Hill complains that a lot of the right-wing narrative comes from opinion pieces, while simultaneously trying to use opinion pieces and anecdotes to prove this narrative wrong.
But that's absolutely just untrue.
We have data from Quillette, where they actually did a list of high-profile bannings.
Almost all of them were on one side of the debate.
Well, we have statements from Jack Dorsey himself, where he actually said that Twitter is so liberal, conservative employees don't feel safe expressing their opinions.
How do you think that will manifest on the platform?
It manifests in rules that target one side.
And Jack Dorsey himself said on the Joe Rogan experience that perhaps they were too aggressive in policing the learn to code meme.
Now, let me show you where things truly take a dark turn.
For one, Campaigns are being banned.
That's scary.
But then we see this story, which is fake news, travel far and wide across the mainstream.
Twitter won't auto-ban neo-Nazis because too many GOP politicians would get banned, report.
Unfortunately, the story's actually fake.
But not only was it covered by spin, but Business Insider picked it up.
The Mary Sue, The Daily News, The Verge, The Week, Rolling Stone, Alternet, GQ, and The Washington Monthly.
These are just the outlets I opened up after a quick Google search.
But there are tweets with 10-20,000 retweets and the narrative is going far and wide.
But in fact, the story's just not true.
In many different ways.
For one, the author of the story has actually tried to refute the narrative.
You know what the real narrative is?
The original story from Motherboard.
Why won't Twitter treat white supremacy like ISIS?
Because it would mean banning some Republican politicians too.
A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians.
The story basically says that in their effort to ban ISIS, they sweep up innocent Muslims because ISIS members use the same rhetoric and the algorithm can't tell the difference.
They believe that the American public is fine with Muslims being banned if it means some ISIS people get banned.
But when it comes to Republicans, they wouldn't tolerate it.
It's not that Republicans are white nationalists.
It's that the algorithm can't tell the difference between different types of content if similar words are used.
Yes, some white nationalists support Donald Trump.
That means if the algorithm targeted them, it would start sweeping out Other people as well.
And the public wouldn't tolerate innocent people being associated with white nationalism when they aren't.
Of course the narrative has evolved.
They're now claiming that if they banned white nationalists, it would ban Republicans.
That's not true.
What they're saying is an algorithmic sweep wouldn't work because they would ban innocent people.
However, That explanation is entirely pointless when you realize the entire premise is false anyway.
Twitter came out and said there is no basis in fact.
Almost immediately, Twitter pushed back.
Twitter pushes back on report about white supremacist content.
This story from the 25th only got 30 shares.
Where they show, Twitter, in a statement to The Hill, said, The story has absolutely no basis in fact,
and disputed the characterization of the exchange at the meeting of March 22.
There are no simple algorithms that find all abusive content on the internet,
and we certainly wouldn't avoid turning them on for political reasons, the Twitter spokesperson said.
I showed you that these policies backfire on the left, but for some reason that is the majority opinion, at least when it comes to those vocal about these issues.
There are people on the left who are defending free speech and opposing censorship, but unfortunately, as fairness and accuracy in reporting has pointed out, it is a minority position.
And then you see the fake news go viral, aligning Republicans with white nationalists, creating more division in this country, and getting more people to demand action be taken against white nationalists, even if it means A broad algorithmic stroke that will ban even Republicans.
What they don't seem to understand is they're simultaneously arguing that innocent Muslims should be banned and that they themselves should be banned too.
And this is what they seem not to be able to grasp.
We have the evidence staring us in the face that they are usually the first to be banned themselves because they're the ones who hear the dog whistles.
They are the ones who report on this and it will lead to disaster.
It's so confusing how you can have Jack Dorsey himself say his employees are so biased conservatives are scared to share their opinions.
You can have the rules which Plainly support the left-wing ideology on misgendering.
You can have employees, over and over again, uncovered, on the record, saying there is a bias, they ban MAGA, etc.
James O'Keefe from Veritas highlighted this in secretly recorded interviews.
Yet when one employee makes an accusation, it's fact.
After all the evidence lines up, they say it's just a conspiracy theory Republicans believe, it's not true.
But one Twitter employee anonymously telling Motherboard they may or may not do something, and everyone on the mainstream left, they run wild with a fake news narrative, and demand more censorship, and get themselves censored.
Whatever.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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