FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE ARE POLITICAL PROPAGANDA MACHINES JUST LIKE HITLER’S PROPAGANDA MACHINES
Facebook Meta’s decision to selectively decrease the reach of political content on Facebook, proves that the tech giant is being politically biased.
“Facebook made sure no one saw the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election,” the House Republican tweeted. “But now that America has record inflation, rising crime, & border crisis —all as a result of Dem policies— Facebook is shutting down more ‘political content’ to hide the truth from Americans.”
Meta announced recently that it would be implementing changes around the world to decrease “political content” in users’ Facebook feeds. The company made the announcement on July 19, saying that changes to decrease the spread of political content on Facebook through a ranking system would be made around the world.
“Our tests have concluded and demonstrated that placing less emphasis on likes and shares for political content is an effective way to reduce the amount of political content people experience in their Feed. We have now implemented these changes globally,” the company announced.
The company originally announced these changes in February 2021, saying that it was hoping to decrease political content in news feeds. These changes included moves to “rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals.”
Content from the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and other health agencies were “exempt” from the tests, with the company citing their “authoritative” status.
The company’s political ranking tests were later expanded to “Facebook Watch” in December 2021, and they announced in May this year that they would be weighing comments and shares on political posts less in a continued effort to decrease the reach of political posts.
McCarthy’s criticism stems from Facebook’s limiting of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story prior to the 2020 election.
In October 2020, the company began limiting the reach of a Post story that alleged that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a Ukrainian energy executive a year before the vice president pushed Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor who was then probing the executive’s company.
“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone tweeted shortly after the story broke. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.”
Since that time, outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have confirmed aspects of the laptop story, which some had initially dismissed as Russian propaganda.
The campaigning Philippines journalist Maria Ressa, who was last week awarded the Nobel peace prize, has launched a stinging attack on Facebook, accusing the social media firm of being a threat to democracy that was “biased against facts” and failed to prevent the spread of disinformation.
She said its algorithms “prioritise the spread of lies laced with anger and hate over facts”.
Ressa, who co-founded the news website Rappler, won the Nobel prize on Friday for her work to “safeguard freedom of expression”, along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov.
Ressa said Facebook had become the world’s largest distributor of news, “yet it is biased against facts, it is biased against journalism … If you have no facts, you can’t have truths, you can’t have trust. If you don’t have any of these, you don’t have a democracy.”
Ressa’s rebuke came days after former employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen claimed the company placed profits over people. UK politicians are also raising concerns about Facebook’s ability to protect children from harmful content, with one senior Tory MP accusing it of deploying a “ridiculous scouts-honour system” for verifying the age of its users.
There are now cross-party calls for action from Facebook and the government in the wake of Haugen’s explosive testimony, in which she accused the firm of steering young users towards damaging content. She also suggested that the minimum age for social media accounts should be raised from 13 to 17.
Julian Knight, Tory chair of the digital, culture, media and sport committee, called on Facebook to demonstrate that it was capable of enforcing even its existing rules. “It’s less about the minimum age, more about the way social media companies police this at present,” he said. “They rely on a ridiculous scouts-honour system when actually we need them to actively pursue proper, regulated, robust age assurance. Time is long past that they took responsibility.”
Other parties also called on the government to step in and strengthen measures in its online harms bill, which is designed to protect children from dangerous content. The NSPCC is among those claiming that the current plans do not go far enough. Ministers insist it will force social media companies to remove and limit the spread of harmful content or face fines of billions of pounds.
Jo Stevens, the shadow culture secretary, said that Facebook had proved “time and time again” that it could not be trusted and the government now needed to step in. “It has entirely lived up to its internal strategy to ‘move fast and break things’ no matter what the cost, provided it doesn’t affect its bottom line,” she said.
“Four years on from the Conservative government’s promise of tough legislation against online harms, all we have is a weak and watered-down bill that will still allow Facebook to self-regulate. It doesn’t matter what age limits are adopted, Facebook cannot be trusted to put public safety before its profits.”
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, called for schools to teach children about how to use social media safely and responsibly.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said: “Our pioneering online safety bill will make the internet a safer place and is the most comprehensive in the world at protecting children. It will require internet companies to enforce age limits so underage kids can’t access pornography or content that is harmful to them, such as promotion of self harm and eating disorders.”
Facebook denied that the company put profits above people and said it was using sophisticated methods to weed out children not old enough to have an account. “Protecting our community is more important than maximising our profits,” it said. “To say we turn a blind eye to feedback ignores these investments, including the 40,000 people working on safety and security at Facebook and our investment of $13bn since 2016.
“We use artificial intelligence and the age people provide at sign-up to understand if people are telling the truth about their age when using our platforms. On Instagram alone, these processes helped us remove over 600,000 underage users between June and August this year. We will continue to invest in new tools as well as working closely with our industry partners to make our systems as effective as possible.”
According to a European Commission document, the company’s vice president, Nick Clegg, revealed that Facebook’s independent fact-checkers, who are hired to censor so-called “fake news,” are seemingly motivated by their own bias.
Facebook has long been accused of using “fact-checks” to secretly pursue a political agenda that aims to eradicate conservatives from the online community.
Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister, made the stunning admission to EU officials last November.
Details of discussions, about the tech giant’s handling of misinformation on its platforms, were revealed in the European Commission document that was obtained by The Daily Mail.
Facebook announced its fact-checking program in 2016 as a means to prevent the election of President Trump and Brexit from ever occurring again.
© pressMany praised the move from Facebook, but many others were quick to point out what appeared to be examples of bias in the enforcement of the new fact-checking policies, according to Breitbart.
Facebook has been accused of censoring legitimate stories and stifling public debate, notably in recent months the company has been accused of censoring stories relating to the theory that coronavirus could have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
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For months, Facebook removed or placed warning labels on stories relating to this theory, until last month it reversed this decision entirely when Democrat Joe Biden ordered an inquiry into the claims.
Now, minutes of a meeting between Clegg and Vera Jourova, vice-president of the European Commission, appear to show that Clegg is aware that the site’s fact-checkers might be biased.
The minutes of the meeting state: “He [Mr. Clegg] also stressed that independent fact-checkers are not necessarily objective because they have their own agenda.”
Former UK Cabinet Minister David Jones commented on Clegg’s statement, saying that it was “deeply worrying.”“The admission completely destroys the credibility of Facebook’s own procedures,” Jones added.
“It offers news organizations no right of appeal when it censors them, even though it may have acted on the advice of fact-checkers who are motivated by ‘their own agenda’.”
© pressFacebook commented on the situation, saying in a statement: “Nick never suggested there is bias in our fact-checking program.
“He did describe that one benefit of having a range of independent fact-checking partners is the variety of specialisms in different countries and issue areas that they bring.”
Clegg’s comments come amid mounting concern that Facebook is shutting down public debate.
Facebook began placing fact-checking warnings on stories about the possibility of a lab leak at the beginning of the pandemic.
Then in February, the tech giant announced it would remove “false claims on Facebook and Instagram” suggesting that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured.
Among the articles labeled as “false information” was one written by award-winning MoS journalist Ian Birrell on the UnHerd website.
The tech giant later apologized for its “mistake.”
In March, Facebook placed a warning label on an article written in the Wall Street Journal by a US surgeon about herd immunity.
The opinion piece by Dr. Martin Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, predicted that Covid-19 “will be mostly gone by April” in the US.
Facebook added a “missing context” label to Dr. Makary’s piece after an investigation by Health Feedback, one of its third-party “fact-checkers.”
“Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people,” the label added.
A furious Wall Street Journal accused Facebook of “counter-opinion masquerading as fact-checking.”
It said Dr. Makary made a projection, not a factual claim, and Facebook was “cherry-picking” studies “to support their own opinions.”
