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1984: Facebook To ‘Rank’ News Organizations

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(Via Buzzfeed)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.

Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.

“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

Zuckerberg met with a group of news media executives at the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Menlo Park after delivering his keynote speech at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference Tuesday.

The meeting included representatives from BuzzFeed News, the Information, Quartz, the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, NBC, Recode, Univision, Barron’s, the Daily Beast, the Economist, HuffPost, Insider, the Atlantic, the New York Post, and others.

The event, called “OTR” (shorthand for “off the record”), is an annual gathering meant for new media news executives to talk shop. It is in its second year. Zuckerberg’s remarks were initially meant to be, like the name of the conference, off the record, but he agreed to answer questions on the record.

Zuckerberg said the company will invest “billions” of dollars in a combination of artificial intelligence and tens of thousands of human moderators to keep both fake news and deliberate propaganda at bay, especially in elections.

“We’re essentially going to be losing money on doing political ads,” he said of the investment the company is making to avoid a repeat of the spread of Russian propaganda in the 2016 US election.

“The big miss is we didn’t expect these kind of coordinated information operations” in 2016, said Zuckerberg, and that the company was more focused on hacking in malware. He said the company is expecting that kind of information war now and has already successfully countered it in elections from France to Alabama.

“We deployed AI tools that have taken down tens of thousands of accounts,” he said of those elections.

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Media

Twitter Profile With No Tweets Or Followers Suspended

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New England – A Twitter page for a group called New England Identitarians was temporarily suspended evidently for using the word “Identitarian”. The page had zero followers at the time, and was yet to even make a tweet. In fact, the page was set to private. 

 

Regardless of what you might think of “Identitarian” ideology, most people can agree that the word itself shouldn’t trigger a ban from the public square, which is what social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter are functioning as. The First Amendment was intended to protect the public from government censorship, but in the current day the main medium for public discourse is social media. Practically speaking, there is no difference. It must be lawfully determined if these companies are neutral platforms, or if they function as publishers with editorial judgement. 

 

The same goes for the popular video platform YouTube as well. Formerly known as a free speech medium, it’s now only friendly for what are deemed acceptable opinions. Across all of these sites, “hate speech” is broadly used as an excuse to censor political views that the company doesn’t like, with a strong partisan bias against conservatives. Other free speech friendly social media networks to try are Telegram, Gab, and Parlor. An up-and-coming alternative to YouTube is BitChute.  For livestreaming, there’s D’Live. Perhaps it’s time that we all begin to migrate away from the tyrannical mainstream sites. 

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Social Media is the Biggest Threat to America… It’s Time to Break Them Up

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After the another mass ban by Facebook and Instagram of Alex Jones, Milo, Laura Loomer, and Paul Joseph Watson, it is evermore clear and a massive warning to all conservatives that they are not welcome on social media platforms. Something that should also be considered illegal considering their ‘public square’ standing and non-publisher status, which saves them from sued for libel but [should] curtail their ability to promote, dissuade, or ban content based on their choice.

Facebook went as far to even say they’ll ban anyone or organization that shares content from Alex Jones, Infowars, or any of the banned people mentioned, maybe even more.

Facebook is also conducting election-meddling.  Gang Emperor Yang, a meme page for Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, was removed less than a month ago.

President Trump has yet to act on this, ironically without social media Donald Trump would never be President. Considering the Media, Entertainment, and Political monopolies are aligned against him it seems maddening that President Trump hasn’t done one thing besides offer the suggestion to “be good” online.

Despite the fact that it’s hard to find to find any popular conservative right besides Ben Shapiro on the internet. When 2020 roles around it’s going to for Donald Trump’s old coalition to remain strong when his followers, his greatest allies in media, and people who helped get elected directly are being de-platformed, silenced, and banned off of social media.

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Facebook Fired Pro-Trump & Anti Hillary Founder of Oculus

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(Via Zerohedge)

Every so often, Silicon Valley’s virtue-signaling, shadowbanning, anti-conservative media titans appear in Congress or devise a quick PR campaign to show to the world just how truly impartial they are with zero liberal bias. And every single time it backfires as their true ideological face quickly emerges from behind a fake, hypocritical mask.

Take the case of former Facebook executive, Oculus co-founder and virtual-reality wunderkind Palmer Luckey, who was a rising star of Silicon Valley when, at the height of the 2016 presidential contest, he donated a modest $10,000 to an anti-Hillary Clinton group. His donation sparked a backlash from his colleagues, which then led to him being put on leave, and six months later he was fired.

What is odd about Luckey’s termination, is that when testifying before Congress about data privacy earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg denied, or rather lied that the departure had anything to do with politics. In fact, neither Facebook nor Mr. Luckey ever said why he left the social-media giant.

Until now: according to a report from the WSJ, Luckey told people the reason for his termination from that bastion of apolitical impartiality Facebook, was his support for Donald Trump and the furor that his political beliefs sparked within his employer, and Silicon Valley, some of those people say.

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