Facebook Refuses To Be Transparent In Combating Fake News — Conservative Censorship At Work

The right has power on social media and the left wants to silence them.

44% of American adults get their news from Facebook according to a Pew Research study.

“Two-thirds of Facebook users access news on the social platform, and with 67 percent of U.S. adults active on Facebook, that translates to 44 percent of the overall U.S. population which accesses news on the social platform, the study said.” It goes on to further state that “A 2013 Pew report found that 47 percent of Facebook users went there for news. Today, 66 percent of Facebook users get news there, the study found.”

That jump from 2013 is huge. Just to show how much power Facebook has, there are currently 1.94 billion users on Facebook as of the first quarter in 2017. These studies can only gauge those 18 years or older. Imagine what it would say if you added those under the age of 18 and where they get their news from?

I wanted to give some numbers for how many get their news from Facebook and the amount of users it has. I feel it is important for the content I will be talking about.

Facebook is claiming they will be a hostile environment for terrorists. Were they not doing this already? Oh, right, they were too busy going after conservatives. This article states that they will ramp up efforts in removing content aimed at supporting terrorism and incidents involving harm. The ironic part about this is that Facebook hired Filipinos for £1.81/hr to filter through the content and remove it. Except they have a quota system and if it’s not met, they will be fired. How much do you want to bet these same individuals may be used to further censor conservative views seeing as how we have a good history of the site already doing this?

What’s that? You can’t find anything else and you have not met your daily quota? Just visit a random conservative page and begin the removal process!

Theresa May, Britain’s Prime Minister, is calling for international communication companies to do more to combat “extremist groups.”

May called on international communications companies to do more to block cyberspace to extremist groups who use it for recruitment and for encrypted information about plots. She called for international agreements to regulate cyberspace and said Britain needs to become more robust at preventing the internet from being used to the advantage of extremist groups. The British government has long sought more help from internet companies like Facebook and Google in the battle against extremism.

She doesn’t say Islamic terrorism, she says extremist groups. Are you a conservative? Well, you should be worried. We’ve been called Nazi sympathisers, bigots, Islamophobic, racists, you name it. Seeing as how being a conservative and even a libertarian to some extent can be considered taboo, would it be farfetched to think we might be targeted and censored online? Not really.

We now have Zuckerberg vowing to combat fake news but refuses to be transparent in how they remove it. This article showcases where Zuckerberg stands on being transparent and those who control the company along with himself are not having it.

Some shareholders called for Facebook to produce an annual report detailing what it has been doing to thwart fake news; however, the idea was put to a vote that did not pass.

It also goes on to say:

Facebook has also tweaked its algorithm to better understand if a story is disputed, weighting it less in a user’s News Feed. The company has also started working with third-party fact checking organizations to help label stories if they are disputed.

In this Gizmodo article, it points out that Facebook was artificially delisting conservative news while propping up more liberal stories. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out their motive here. Why else would they not want to be transparent in how they deal with fake news? Because it would show them removing conservative viewpoints.

One of the examples of censorship I want to use is Steven Crowder of Louder with Crowder on CTRV. Facebook was censoring Crowder’s posts on Facebook and had a plethora of billing “issues” and no one from Facebook could explain why. This video from him does an excellent job at explaining the request of information lawsuit over the blatant censorship. Go watch if you have 20 minutes.

What brings this full circle is the article from Gizmodo where former employees admitted to censoring conservative views. In that article, it states conservative trending stories were being delisted and other stories were being artificially injected into trending news. Twitter has done this for a while where they mark information as “sensitive” and suspend and ban conservative accounts. You talk about a certain subject and if you fit the demographic, you’re going to be silently removed.

It’s not a shocker when the overwhelming majority of those in Silicon Valley supported Clinton and other democrats. I wish I was kidding but I’m not. These tech companies are not fond of conservatives and have never been.

In this day and age, social media companies will do whatever they can to silence us. They’re already doing it but now it will be done under the guise of “you’re advocating fake news” or “you align with someone who’s considered to be an extremist.” All they have to do is say: “You’re wrong, Snopes says so and we are removing your content and banning you from our platform.”

There are other instances of this continuing to happen across all other social media platforms. The good thing for us is that this isn’t the 1930’s and we won’t be silenced. With outlets like Gizmodo and individuals like Crowder doing their part in making sure to expose what sites like Facebook is doing, we will remain strong. We have many avenues to get our message out and it is impossible to stop us.

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