Facebook issued a statement saying that it was removing all content with the phrase, used by supporters of President Trump to question the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, because it violates the company’s policy against “coordinating harm.” Facebook said that it made the decision in light of the pro-Trump riot in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Last night, Facebook followed Twitter in imposing a one-day ban on Donald Trump over its social-media platforms. On second thought this morning, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to spend the next two weeks having to guess when to pull that trigger again. Instead, Facebook and Instagram will lock out the president of the United States until he goes into retirement…
Hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were used to violate election laws, according to a new report.
The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, a national constitutional litigation organization, released the 39-page report, alleging that Zuckerberg’s $500 million given to election officials was used to treat voters unequally and to improperly influence the election for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The twin lawsuits filed against Facebook this week by the government and more than 40 attorneys general are the most serious effort to break the social media giant up to date.
The cases, which differ slightly, focus on the allegation that Facebook made acquisitions in an effort to decrease competition in the social network marketplace and ultimately worsened the quality of options available to consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission and 48 state and territory attorneys general propose a solution to that issue: divestiture.
Tick-tock.
Mark Zuckerberg knew this was coming. Unlike Google, which successfully cozied up to lefties, leading a lot of Democrat AGs to stay away from the DOJ’s attack on Google, Democrats hated it because the platform was filled with older Trump voters, and Republicans hated it because it kept censoring Trump voters.
The attorney general of New York has filed a massive antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, seeking to force a divestiture of acquisitions such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
The suit filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is spearheaded by New York Attorney General Letitia James, and joined by 47 other state attorneys general.
Imagine if a billionaire of conservative or libertarian leanings—Charles Koch, say—had given $350 million to a nonprofit run by Republican operatives who previously worked at a “dark money” outfit tied to Karl Rove where they trained digital activists and campaign workers.
Then imagine this nonprofit group re-granted the millions of dollars to local election officials to “help” them carry out the 2020 election—buying drop boxes for ballots, hiring temporary staff, conducting “voter education,” and the like.
Finally, imagine that in 2020, a state that usually voted for the other party in presidential elections narrowly flipped to the donor’s preferred party, and counties receiving “help” were disproportionately ones that helped the Republican win the state, with many counties shifting dramatically from their historical patterns in a red-ward direction.
Even supposing there were perfectly ethical and legal reasons for all this, because of the appearance of election influence from private parties with deep pockets, it would be front-page news. The New York Times would be outraged a nonprofit gave the appearance of acting in a partisan basis in an electoral process. Elected officials in the disfavored party would be loudly objecting, threatening lawsuits, demanding investigations of the election officials who accepted the funds, and insisting election laws be changed to prevent any such effort in the future.
Facebook has updated its hate speech algorithm, reversing years of neutrality to prioritize anti-black comments while making anti-white slurs the lowest priority.
The tech giant’s new system for detecting hate speech, known internally as the WoW Project, will automatically delete hateful language directed at the LGBTQ community, Jews, Muslims and African Americans — which has been dubbed by Facebook engineers as the “worst of the worst,” the Washington Post reported.
The company will now begin scoring hate speech and offensive posts, and remarks about “men,” “whites” and “Americans” will be marked “low sensitivity,” the report said.
A few riots and some low sensitivity shopping should change that.
The press release issued yesterday states that “[g]iven the recent news that COVID-19 vaccines will soon be rolling out around the world, over the coming weeks we will start removing false claims about these vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts on Facebook and Instagram. This is another way that we are applying our policy to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm.”
Even The Washington Post has called out Facebook for its new racial double standards.
Facebook “is overhauling its algorithms that detect hate speech and deprioritizing hateful comments against Whites, men and Americans,” The Washington Post reported on Thursday. This overhaul of Facebook’s moderation projects is “known as the WoW Project,” according to internal documents obtained by The Post.
Facebook’s Oversight Board has chosen its first batch of cases to review.
All involve decisions originally made by the platform to remove user content.
They include images of female breasts in a post about breast cancer, and an image of a dead child alongside text about whether retaliation was justified against China for its treatment of Uighur Muslims.
The board said Facebook users had submitted 20,000 suggested incidents for review since October 2020.
Facebook made changes to its algorithm after the election to prioritize certain news outlets the company deems more authoritative.
According to a New York Times report, Facebook made the changes in an effort to combat President Trump’s and right-wing media outlets’ claims about election fraud, which the company has labeled “false or misleading.”
The company will now emphasize the importance of what Facebook calls its “news ecosystem quality” score, or “N.E.Q.” N.E.Q. is an internal tool the company uses to assign a ranking to news publishers based on Facebook’s definition of quality journalism.
The Solomon Islands Government has defended its decision to place a temporary ban on Facebook, a move it says is aimed at tackling cyberbullying and online defamation.
