The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. Source: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies | University of Michigan News
A national TV news producer says all news is basically driven by ratings – not importance or value to the viewer. Most news is intentionally devoid of context and facts.
In 2017, without warning or recourse, Google shut down all services associated with Salil Mehta, a professor of statistics, editor of a statistics journal, author of a best selling book on statistics, a former Obama administration official and later, a polling statistics adviser to the Trump campaign. His offense? He ran a blog about mathematics! Google, Facebook and Twitter have become the totalitarian governments of the 21st century, stifling speech their algorithms choose to flag. Unlike us peons, Mehta is well connected and a huge outcry caused Google to reinstate his account.
Newspapers worldwide have agreed to jointly engage in a global Covering Climate Now project, where newspapers and other news outlets simultaneously use their advocacy journalism to persuade readers to take action on climate. This is indistinguishable from a global, coordinated propaganda operation and may back fire, turning people off from understanding and undertaking meaningful actions on climate issues.
NBC makes a major error in reporting on a Trump speech and then retracts its claim, on Twitter – but leaves the original incorrect headline and incorrect video online. NBC News had the story completely wrong.
Tweets published by those with verified “blue check mark” accounts get greater visibility on Twitter. Twitter also admitted to using algorithms to shadow banning 600,00 accounts including those of U.S. Congressional representatives. Twitter is a mess.
Twitter’s failed algorithm censored people based on their assessment of their followers, over which the censored person has no control. This caused Twitter to effectively shadow ban over 600,000 accounts, including those belonging to members of Congress.
This sure looks like an admission of shadow banning – this from Twitter:
“We want to be clear that we do not shadow ban according to political ideology or viewpoint. We do rank the timeline and we do that with the principle of relevance, but all the content is still there — you just have to do more work to see it.”
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This propaganda poster is now spreading online. The original Vox Tweet is here. It contains a link to a video explaining their thinking. They are clear in their video that they are not advocating censoring these individuals. The video concludes with the problems that emerge when speech is censored and the practical problems of policing platforms like YouTube that see 400 hours of new video uploaded every minute. The Vox video does not encourage censorship. Commentary There is, though, a…
Facebook restricts certain conduct on its platform. However, journalists and academics are seeking to receive special privileges to do things that are prohibited for others. Journalists and academics, for example, would be permitted to set up fake accounts with fake or curated content, for the purpose of studying users. Individuals, however, would be banned from conducting the same research and thus, would be prohibited from verifying or evaluating the work of journalists and academics. Basically, the proposal is to have…