White House is flagging posts on FB to censor

[Lamb]

White House ‘flagging’ posts for Facebook to censor over COVID ‘misinformation’

After Surgeon General Vivek Murthy had called on social media companies to get rid of problematic posts, Jen Psaki admitted the government’s involvement in looking to take down certain posts …

nypost.com

How do you feel about the government taking away your freedom of speech?

 

[tango]

I pretty much ignore anything official about COVID these days, most of it has proven to be more about stoking fear than anything useful.

 

[NathanH83]

I think it’s stupid. I’m ready for Trump to release his own social network.

 

[Forgiven1]

First COVID, then what is next?

 

[Lamb]

I pretty much ignore anything official about COVID these days, most of it has proven to be more about stoking fear than anything useful.

Yeah, the new thing now is to say that high percentage of the Delta variant since last month. Well, with lower numbers last month, any increase is going to seem very high. But let's make them panic and call it 70% instead of saying a thousand more?

I think it’s stupid. I’m ready for Trump to release his own social network.

I'm really hoping Trump creates something good. I'm sick of all this that we have to put up with.

First COVID, then what is next?

That's the fear I have. What else will they be restricting soon enough?

 

[JRT]

In time of war we have no hesitation in giving up our right to speculate wildly. This pandemic is a war and has already killed far more than all the US casualties in WW1 and WW2 and Korea combined. I believe the government has every right to shut down false information being spread on social media. When the Bill of Rights was framed we should also have had a Bill of Responsibilities.

 

[tango]

In time of war we have no hesitation in giving up our right to speculate wildly. This pandemic is a war and has already killed far more than all the US casualties in WW1 and WW2 and Korea combined. I believe the government has every right to shut down false information being spread on social media. When the Bill of Rights was framed we should also have had a Bill of Responsibilities.

Silly me, I was there thinking adults could make up their own minds. Shutting down information deemed false sounds an awful lot like nations we've blown up to free them from dictatorships.

Interestingly, given the social networks claim they are little more than the digital equivalent of the public square, they do seem very quick to shut down things they dislike. They haven't been the "digital public square" for some time now.

 

[tango]

Yeah, the new thing now is to say that high percentage of the Delta variant since last month. Well, with lower numbers last month, any increase is going to seem very high. But let's make them panic and call it 70% instead of saying a thousand more?

Percentages are often used to make things look more scary. It reminds me of the studies that show something like "eating bacon results in a 150% increase in risk of heart attack" when the reality is that eating your own body weight in bacon increases the risk from 0.001% to 0.0025%. Technically the headline figure is true but the reality isn't what you'd expect from reading the headline.

Saying something is "far more dangerous" makes people who already think the COVID virus lurks behind every corner and actively wants to kill them (hint: it doesn't and it doesn't) even more fearful and even more pliable. It seems the reality is that it's more contagious but no more severe. That sounds like I've still got a 99.98% chance of surviving it, even if I am more likely to catch it. But then in rural areas it's less likely that I'll catch it anyway because keeping space around me is easier and I'm almost never in crowded spaces.

That's the fear I have. What else will they be restricting soon enough?

Whatever gets people scared next time, probably with a lot of help from the sensationalist media.

 

[Stravinsk]

White House ‘flagging’ posts for Facebook to censor over COVID ‘misinformation’

After Surgeon General Vivek Murthy had called on social media companies to get rid of problematic posts, Jen Psaki admitted the government’s involvement in looking to take down certain posts …

nypost.com

How do you feel about the government taking away your freedom of speech?

I'm not at all surprised. If anything, I hope it shows people that governments around the world (including "free" US) are under direction from the financial elite that really run things. It's Banker control which is what the world gets when they allow their money to be printed out of thin air at interest.

My facebook was censored (several posts just simply removed) early in 2020 when I started exposing the scam. Videos were removed, along with information on Microsoft's 666 patent on blockchain/body activity data, Gates's ties to GAVI and other things. I see posts on these topics now on other people's pages...but when I posted them early on they were removed.

 

[TonyC7]

It’s very upsetting to see how this administration is operating. This is the opposite of free speech.

 

[hedrick]

I don't think anyone is proposing censoring individual's postings. Facebook makes its money by ads, posting that people pay to be put up on everyone's page, or the pages of targeted groups. The postings under discussion here seem to be ads. I think it's fine for Facebook to refuse to accept ads that it knows are false. I'd have a problem with censoring users' posts.

 

[tango]

I'd be concerned if the White House is telling a supposedly independent company what ads they can and can't be showing.

 

[Lamb]

I don't think anyone is proposing censoring individual's postings. Facebook makes its money by ads, posting that people pay to be put up on everyone's page, or the pages of targeted groups. The postings under discussion here seem to be ads. I think it's fine for Facebook to refuse to accept ads that it knows are false. I'd have a problem with censoring users' posts.

None of the articles I read said anything about this only being ads. Ads are either approved or rejected by people, not censored. So could you state your source of information of it being ads?

 

[hedrick]

None of the articles I read said anything about this only being ads. Ads are either approved or rejected by people, not censored. So could you state your source of information of it being ads?

I've found it difficult to find information on exactly how this s working. I'll give you the basis for my guess:
* Most of the conservative political posts on my Facebook page are sponsored postings, not things individuals have posted. Take a look at Facebook yourself. A fairly large chunk of what's there is really ads -- sponsored postings. It's not normally traditional ads, i.e. things advertising products, though some of it is. Much of it is political or religious, including non-profits, and much of it is from perfectly reasonable sources.
* Around the election, controversies about Facebook policies were about political ads, not censoring individual posts
* It's hard to see how 18 people could be the source of much of the information without using ads. To my knowledge there's no one an individual can post to large numbers of people without using the ad mechanism.

I would be interested to see any solid information on exactly how this is happening.

 

[hedrick]

Here’s one discussion of an experiment to check Facebooks tracking of false information. Facebook approves ads declaring COVID-19 a 'hoax' and urging people to gather also this. Facebook is going to start telling you when you see false information about coronavirus. While they are trting to warn people sharing bad information, it appears that the posts they are sharing are likely ads. Certainly the example in the story is a sponsored post.

 

[Lamb]

I've never seen any of my conservative Republican friends share an Ad on Facebook before.

 

[Bluezone777]

They also want to monitor what people text as well as social media for the so called purpose of restricting access to "misinformation".

 

[tango]

Here’s one discussion of an experiment to check Facebooks tracking of false information. Facebook approves ads declaring COVID-19 a 'hoax' and urging people to gather also this. Facebook is going to start telling you when you see false information about coronavirus. While they are trting to warn people sharing bad information, it appears that the posts they are sharing are likely ads. Certainly the example in the story is a sponsored post.

Facebook has been tagging all sorts of stuff with links to "information pages" even when it's clearly not appropriate. The other day I posted a silly meme showing the four horsemen of the apocalypse where three were waiting for the last one who was a distance back on his phone. The caption was "hold on, Pestilence is posting an anti-vax meme". Facebook decided this was worthy of an automatic link to a COVID vaccine information site.

I saw another meme some weeks ago that, with the language toned down somewhat, commented how nobody warned the poster that getting the vaccine meant that after drinking 20 pints of beer and eating your own body weight in peanuts you might soil yourself. Needless to say Facebook felt it necessary to "fact check" the post, declare it false and post a link to "correct" information.

What is most concerning of all is the simple question of who decides what is "correct" and what is "misinformation". Given the official advice was originally that we, the general public should not cover our faces only for a rapid about-turn for reasons that still aren't entirely satisfactorily explained it's hard to see why conflicting views need to be censored so heavily. Curiously the posts that suggest going out in public without a sock on your head is morally equivalent to spraying gunfire into a crowd don't seem to get censored.

 

[Lamb]

What is most concerning of all is the simple question of who decides what is "correct" and what is "misinformation".

Bingo! When we're told something is false and then it turns out to be true later, well, why should they have the ability to censor that when they weren't 100% positive in the first place of the truth.

Aren't these 20 somethings doing the censoring? Do they have all the knowledge needed to know what's true and what isn't? No way.

 

[tango]

Bingo! When we're told something is false and then it turns out to be true later, well, why should they have the ability to censor that when they weren't 100% positive in the first place of the truth.

Even without the question of things we were told were false later turning out to be true, the eternal question of "who watches the watchers?" needs to be answered.

Aren't these 20 somethings doing the censoring? Do they have all the knowledge needed to know what's true and what isn't? No way.

Most of it seems to be very badly written algorithms that decide what gets censored. A friend of mine is an internationally published scientist who posted a rebuttal of something that was scientifically false and his post was automatically censored because of the content - the algorithm spotted the article he rebutted and decided the post was misinformation.

If anything that makes the process even more disconcerting - if a computer is merely looking for "trigger words" to censor a post it's not even as if there's an intelligent process behind it. But then I guess it just provides another reason, as if it were needed, not to use social media as a source of useful information. If only they would show more posts from friends and fewer paid posts it would be so much more useful.