Canadian politicians, both Liberals and Conservatives, have denounced Facebook for the suspension of the Tamil Guardian’s Instagram account. Instagram suspended the account of the Sri Lanka-based outlet for over 48 hours earlier this week.
The irony is that the same politicians that have called for more online censorship are the ones that have complained when social media’s algorithms have failed to censor what they want, and instead censored what they don’t want to be censored.
In the past few weeks, media outlets and liberal commentators have seized on revelations from former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen as proof that the social media giant, far from censoring conservative voices, is actually profiting from playing them up.
They’ve used Haugen’s testimony before Congress and the thousands of internal Facebook documents she leaked to dismiss complaints about anti-conservative bias among Big Tech platforms. The argument now is that Facebook wasn’t doing enough to censor conservative voices after the 2020 presidential election and should have cracked down on information circulating on the platform before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Truth Social, the new social media platform that Donald Trump says he is rolling out, will combat censorship and the “self-righteous scolds and self-appointed arbiters” who the former president said decide what everyone else is allowed to “think, say, share, and do.”
Earlier this year, the bill died in the Senate before the end of the last parliamentary session. Now that the Liberals have a minority government, they want to make regulating the internet a top priority.
Twitter said it wasn’t clear why its Home timeline produced these results and indicated that it may now need to change its algorithm.
The Canadian government is considering new rules to regulate how social media platforms moderate potentially harmful user-generated content. Already, the proposed legislation has been criticized by internet scholars — across the political spectrum — as some of the worst in the world.
The way that Facebook controls its News Feed is often controversial and largely opaque to the outside world.
Now the social network is attempting to shine more light on the content it suppresses but doesn’t remove entirely. On Thursday, Facebook published its “Content Distribution Guidelines” detailing the roughly three-dozen types of posts it demotes for various reasons in the News Feed, like clickbait and posts by repeat policy offenders. That process, which relies heavily on machine learning technology to automatically detect problematic content, effectively throttles the reach of offending posts and comments without the author knowing.
The law, known as HB 20, prohibits social media platforms from banning or suspending users, and removing or suppressing their content, based on political viewpoint. The bill was introduced by state Sen. Bryan Hughes partly in an effort to combat perceived censorship of conservatives by Facebook, Twitter, Google-owned YouTube, and other major tech companies.
The complaint, dated Aug. 31, alleged that the federal government “admits to conspiring with social media companies to censor messages with which it disagrees.”
The lawsuit argued that this viewpoint discrimination, in which the federal government directs Big Tech companies to censor views that challenge a certain narrative, violated the First Amendment.
The Department of Canadian Heritage has proposed a new legal framework to deal with “harmful” content. The framework would establish new regulatory entities with broad authority over speech and information shared on platforms like Twitter or Facebook. The rules it creates for platforms sound good on paper, but that’s about it. They disregard international experience with past laws and similar proposals around the world, as well as recommendations from legal and human rights experts inside and outside of Canada.
Forming an “election commission” to oversee a fair and smooth election process, until recently, used to be something exclusively reserved for nation states, but now Facebook is reported to be meddling in that domain, at least semantics-wise.
Twitter staff will review certain reported tweets depending on the topic or level of exposure and determine if they violate the company’s misinformation policies, a Twitter spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Maxime Bernier and I follow each other, but I’m not allowed to like this tweet.
The vaccinated and the unvaccinated should all oppose #VaccinePassports.
Everybody’s basic freedoms will be destroyed if we become a surveillance and police state.
— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) August 11, 2021
A Republican senator has introduced a bill that would require the White House to disclose the censorship requests it sends to Facebook and other social media companies. The introduction of the bill follows a revelation that the White House was flagging posts promoting COVID misinformation on Facebook.
Don’t they know the US government is above the law?
Twitter has just suspended the “Audit War Room” accounts of multiple states including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona. This comes on the same day as the start of the January 6 Select Committee hearings. Earlier today, National File reported that the Audit War Room account for Arizona was suspended, which prompted a response from Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who said “Twitter just suspended the Arizona Audit account as well as the Audit War Room account. Follow me on Telegram and Gab for when I am booted. I will be next.”
