Free Speech and (Big Tech) Censorship Thread

[Husky_Khan]

This thread needs more bumps because it happens so often... for example.

Facebook eyeing tools used in Sri Lanka, Myanmar in case of election unrest in US: report

Facebook officials are reportedly considering the use of tools developed for so-called at-risk countries in times of political instability during the upcoming U.S. election.The Wall Street Journal&…

thehill.com

Excellent. If it worked in countries mired in civil strife and authoritarianism like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, it should work even better in the United States. But whom will we get to utilize these tools?

Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors

China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors? There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on cen…

nypost.com

Oh... nevermind. I guess Facebook covered all their bases.

 

[Cherico]

This thread needs more bumps because it happens so often... for example.

Facebook eyeing tools used in Sri Lanka, Myanmar in case of election unrest in US: report

Facebook officials are reportedly considering the use of tools developed for so-called at-risk countries in times of political instability during the upcoming U.S. election.The Wall Street Journal&…

thehill.com

Excellent. If it worked in countries mired in civil strife and authoritarianism like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, it should work even better in the United States. But whom will we get to utilize these tools?

Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors

China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors? There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on cen…

nypost.com

Oh... nevermind. I guess Facebook covered all their bases.

that's pretty much treason isn't it? Having forging nationals censor americans? I mean we don't just have one smoking gun we have a literal pile of them maybe the republicans need to find their balls and handle this now?

 

[Bacle]

So it seems FB is in cahoots with Biden.

 

[Duke Nukem]

So it seems FB is in cahoots with Biden.

This pretty much confirms what we already knew.

 

[Cherico]

This pretty much confirms what we already knew.

Maybe its time to send Zuck to prison.

 

[Typhonis]

Or declare Facebook is no longer protected by 230. If you gonna make content or censor people, you don't get protection.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Biden campaign fury at blocked Facebook ads

Both Biden and Trump campaigns say political ads have been wrongly blocked from the social network.

www.bbc.com

Ha!

Democrats be mad now about ads being blocked on Facebook.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Wired Magazine did a biiiiiiig article on Youtube's AI based algorithm and how it's going to town on conspiracies dealing with QAnon, the WuFlu and the poor Flat Earthers.

For four years, Sargent's flat-earth videos got a steady stream of traffic from YouTube's algorithms. Then, in January 2019, the flow of new viewers suddenly slowed to a trickle. His videos weren't being recommended anywhere near as often. When he spoke to his flat-earth peers online, they all said the same thing. New folks weren't clicking. What's more, Sargent discovered, someone—or something—was watching his lectures and making new decisions: The YouTube algorithm that had previously recommended other conspiracies was now more often pushing mainstream videos posted by CBS, ABC, or Jimmy Kimmel Live, including ones that debunked or mocked conspiracist ideas. YouTube wasn't deleting Sargent's content, but it was no longer boosting it. And when attention is currency, that's nearly the same thing.

“You will never see flat-earth videos recommended to you, basically ever,” he told me in dismay when we first spoke in April 2020. It was as if YouTube had flipped a switch.

In a way, it had. Scores of them, really—a small army of algorithmic tweaks, deployed beginning in 2019. Sargent's was among the first accounts to feel the effects of a grand YouTube project to teach its recommendation AI how to recognize the conspiratorial mindset and demote it. It was a complex feat of engineering, and it worked; the algorithm is less likely now to promote misinformation. But in a country where conspiracies are recommended everywhere—including by the president himself - can't fix what's broken.

It later goes into detail how they developed their new AI that classifies "borderline" material that they felt should be down ranked.

But what about content that wasn't quite bad enough to be deleted? Like alleged conspiracies or dubious information that doesn't advocate violence or promote “dangerous remedies or cures” or otherwise explicitly violate policies? Those videos wouldn't be removed by moderators or the content-blocking AI. And yet, some executives wondered if they were complicit by promoting them at all. “We noticed that some people were watching things that we weren't happy with them watching,” says Johanna Wright, one of YouTube's vice presidents of product management, “like flat-earth videos.” This was what executives began calling “borderline” content. “It's near the policy but not against our policies,” as Wright said.

By early 2018, YouTube executives decided they wanted to tackle the borderline material too. It would require adding a third R to their strategy—“reduce.” They'd need to engineer a new AI system that would recognize conspiracy content and misinformation and down-rank it.

...

To create an AI classifier that can recognize borderline video content, you need to train the AI with many thousands of examples. To get those training videos, YouTube would have to ask hundreds of ordinary humans to decide what looks dodgy and then feed their evaluations and those videos to the AI, so it could learn to recognize what dodgy looks like. That raised a fundamental question: What is “borderline” content? It's one thing to ask random people to identify an image of a cat or a crosswalk—something a Trump supporter, a Black Lives Matter activist, and even a QAnon adherent could all agree on. But if they wanted their human evaluators to recognize something subtler—like whether a video on Freemasons is a study of the group's history or a fantasy about how they secretly run government today—they would need to provide guidance.

YouTube assembled a team to figure this out. Many of its members came from the policy department, which creates and continually updates the rules about the content YouTube bans outright. They developed a set of about three dozen questions designed to help a human decide whether content moved significantly in the direction of those banned areas, but didn't quite get there.

And a concluding remark

By the summer, YouTube was publicly declaring success: It had reduced by 50 percent the watch time of borderline content that came from recommendations. By December it reported a reduction of 70 percent.

...

The channels they grouped under “Social Justice,” on the far left, lost a third of their traffic to mainstream sources like CNN; conspiracy channels and most on the reactionary right—like “White Identitarian” and “Religious Conservative”—saw the majority of their traffic slough off to commercial right-wing channels, with Fox News being the hugest beneficiary.

Then it goes on to tell how 2020 and the pandemic and race riots, sorry George Floyd riots, helped flip up everything all over again and ends with a very sad note, as the Google Engineers seem sad that they cannot control society as easily as they thought they had hoped.

One of the former Google engineers I spoke to agreed: “Now that society is so polarized, I'm not sure YouTube alone can do much,” as the engineer noted. “People who have been radicalized over the past few years aren't getting unradicalized. The time to do this was years ago.”

*points and laughs*

 

[Husky_Khan]

Twitter bans David Icke over Covid misinformation

Mr Icke's account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter's rules on Covid misinformation.

www.bbc.com

Kinda surprised it hadn't happened already... much less for something as mild as WuFlu misinformation considering it's David Icke.

RIP...

 

[Cherico]

you know we could have stopped this fuckery in its tracks 2 fucking years ago.

but you know maybe this is a lesson on not being lazy asshats.

 

[gral]

I don't know if you heard, stocks of Twitter, Facebook and all related companies went up today, after the Election-related news(Facebook had an 8% rise today, I think).

 

[Aldarion]

This is rather worrying:

British Lawyers, Activists Seek to Dismantle Racist, Antisemitic YouTube Alternative Website - Algemeiner.com

JNS.org - Google Play banned the third-party app BitChute this week, which was promoted as a “free speech” alternative to YouTube that has become a safe haven for neo-Nazis, hosting racist, violent and antisemitic videos that are later posted on social media. Google suspended the app, stating...

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Husky_Khan]

Steve Bannon banned (heh) from Twitter for stating he wants Fauci's head on a pike. A hyperbole he stated on his podcast... Not Twitter itself.

Steve Bannon’s Twitter account suspended

Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s Twitter account was suspended Thursday after allegedly calling for the nation’s leading infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci&#821…

thehill.com

 

[History Learner]

I'd really recommend everyone read Matt Stoller on the subject, as he does excellent work on the subject.

 

[Cherico]

I'd really recommend everyone read Matt Stoller on the subject, as he does excellent work on the subject.

I kind of saw this coming.

Big Tech openly declared war on the right, they have no choice but to crush them and have lots of material reasons to do so. The far left for ideological reasons hates big tech because algorthyms do not pay taxes, and the establishment at the end of the day cant let big tech have that much power because it might be used against them one day.

big tech is going to be crushed.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Twitter may slow down users' ability to 'like' tweets containing misinformation | TechCrunch

Twitter is working to expand the use of its "misinformation" labels on misleading tweets. The company has developed a new feature, not yet live, that

techcrunch.com

Twitter has decided to expand its news publishing options on its "platform" with helpful popups giving an extra reminder that liking or retweeting certain tweets allegedly containing misinformation are allegedly carrying misinformation.

 

[Typhonis]

Ouch sounds like Twitter is opening itself up to legal action.

 

[Yinko]

Not sure if this is the right thread, but it's a pretty niche thing. I was listening to a fiction podcast today and they used "hetero-normative" as an insult.
"That's pretty hetero-normative, Em"
"Yeah, I'm sorry"
Has anyone here ever heard of this being used this way before? It seems... dumb to insult the vast majority of the population like that.

 

[gral]

Not sure if this is the right thread, but it's a pretty niche thing. I was listening to a fiction podcast today and they used "hetero-normative" as an insult.
"That's pretty hetero-normative, Em"
"Yeah, I'm sorry"
Has anyone here ever heard of this being used this way before? It seems... dumb to insult the vast majority of the population like that.

I think I have(although some variation of 'cis-normative' is more likely to be used in that way). And yes, it's dumb, to someone like me or you(that is, hetero-normative). However, just by using this sort of 'insult', he shows he(actually, both people on that conversation) doesn't care about anyone who doesn't share their views.

 

[Husky_Khan]

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/2020-election-update.html

300,000 messages about the election on Twitter were labeled under their 'Civic Integrity Project' which according to them, was 0.2% of the total tweets about the 2020 Elections that were published on their platform.

Twitter also had almost 400 million views on something called "pre-bunk prompts" which are short news articles that Twitter publishes on its platform to inform its users their POV on the elections.