How Facebook suppresses conservative pages
Project Veritas and a former Facebook insider explain some of the technical details behind how Facebook is "dethrottling" people like Steven Crowder and Mike Cernovich:
Conservatives are going to have to stop settling out of court in ways that prevent them from commenting publicly on their experiences or divulging what they've learned, especially because, as Crowder has recently learned, these companies will not live up to their settlement agreements.
According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”It's time to start building class action lawsuits against Facebook and other social media companies engaged in these false, defamatory, and materially damaging practices. And let me assure you that their terms of service don't permit these practices, nor are their legal teams anything to be feared. Remember, despite all their financial resources, these are organizations that are seriously committed to both diversity and identity politics, with all the obvious consequences that follow from those practices.
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s page had been suppressed before in April 2016, and Crowder told Project Veritas they settled a dispute related to the issue with Facebook out of court. Asked for comment on this story, Steven Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond said:
“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”
A screenshot of an action log on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page provided by the insider, shows the tag. The insider believes that the “deboost” code suppresses the distribution of livestream videos on Facebook. Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.
When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just “make stuff up” about people through these systems. “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” said Cernovich.
The insider says that unlike many actions that Facebook content moderators can take against pages, the “deboost” action, which appears to occur algorithmically, does not notify the page’s owner. “[W]ith these ‘deboost live stream’ things, there was no warning sent to the user… These were actions that were being taken without the users knowing.”
Upon further review, the insider says she did not notice the tag on any left-wing pages. “I looked at the Young Turks’ page, I looked at Colin Kaepernick’s page, none of them had received the same deboost comment.”
The “deboost” tag appears after the word “Sigma,” which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts. Both Mike Cernovich and Steven Crowder cannot recall having ever produced any videos on Facebook that promote suicide or self-harm. Mike Cernovich told Project Veritas that in fact he has long spoken out against suicide and self-harm, and provided tweets of his and a blog post as evidence.
Conservatives are going to have to stop settling out of court in ways that prevent them from commenting publicly on their experiences or divulging what they've learned, especially because, as Crowder has recently learned, these companies will not live up to their settlement agreements.
Labels: SJW, technology
37 Comments:
Even if Facebook wanyed to be politically neutral, it wouldn't be able to. As long as they have any kind of moderation they will have to abide by the moderators' political views.
Federated social media is the only solution.
Like all GoodThink Leftists that drone culturally Marxist pablum, Facebook claims to want to live in a world devoid of bias. Which, of course, means a world devoid of biological function.
As much as it shouldn't, it still surprises me that anyone, anywhere, is more concerned with thousand-dollar Russian ad buys on Facebook -- run-of-the-mill statecraft in current year -- than they are with the global mass-manipulation inherent to the platform, itself.
Facebook is particularly dangerous in that it enables the herd to believe, in between bowel movements, that they think freely about anything whatsoever.
Last year about this time, the Qniverse was abuzz about Big Social coming under the jurisdiction of a different .gov department that would end this kind of suppression.
Nothing has come of it.
I sincerely hope someone with clout can get this into Don Jr's hands:
https://www.scribd.com/document/384056753/Media-Matters-Playbook-Searchable
Combine the above with the veritas report and Yamamoto on camera threatening to have a veritas reporter arrested and this has potential legs.
A properly run GOP would seize upon these 3 items, introduce anti-censorship legislation, and pound on it like the commie brigade do their 'green new deal'.
This kind of abuse is anti-American and any attempt to oppose it by the DNC would destroy their party's electability.
The left is convinced that "Hillary won", and it was the people using social media that "stole" the election from her. Telling the truth about leftists (John Kerry - swift boats) is "Hate speech" derailing the win, and the left is determined that in 2020 and beyond, there won't be a repeat of the truth bypassing the gatekeepers.
The left and the elites (Democrat + GOPe) are looking to recreate the time that the big 3 (ABC, NBC, CBS) were the gatekeepers reporting the "news" that had been approved to advance the narrative. JournoList (whatever it's named) serves to coordinate the narrative on the left, so no Kinsley gaffes appear to countradict the narrative. 'Shadow banning', 'deboost', 'demonitizing the feed', etc are the way they are going to reimplement the gatekeeper existance, so truth doesn't get out to a sufficient number of people to affect the election.
https://www.gq.com/story/facebook-moderators-conspiracy-theories
Womp, womp.
Remember, somebody's watching those banned memes, AI or otherwise.
"The “deboost” tag appears after the word “Sigma,” which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts."
So what I'm reading there is that Fashbook is marking them as "triggering" posts that "could cause people to self-harm or suicide". Funny how that never happens with blackpill MSM.
The other day zerohedge ran that piece on FB moderators low paid as they are are getting PTSD from watching all the gore video and these low paid drones are becoming conspiracy theorists from the constant bombardment of troll junk put on FB. Of course I am not a lawyer but that looks like an attack surface.
I, and thousands of others, perhaps tens of thousands, are willing and able to support lawfare in these cases. What we need are the proper legal teams who cannot be bought off or easily swayed from the battle.
We saw people pledging money for crowdfunding a border wall. I'm sure we could generate a similar response for lawfare. But what is our platform for crowdfunding?
“Remember, despite all their financial resources, these are organizations that are seriously committed to both diversity and identity politics, with all the obvious consequences that follow from those practices.”
Too true. When your enemy is opposed to competence as a matter of principle, it self-selects against winning.
I see that this is why the SJW appeals to amenable authority. Being saved by daddy is a necessary part of the victim narrative.
The big problem with settlements is that there is no way to know if they are being honored. Crowder wouldn't have known FB was violating terms unless an employee who was willing to be fired leaked the details. I am hoping the settlement calls for huge penalties in the case of violation but I doubt it will be anywhere near enough to make it really hurt for FB. Crowder is likely going to get 7 or maybe even 8 figures and that will be the end of it. FB will continue doing what they are doing and might put Crowder on the white list that leftist channels clearly are on. The rest of the conservative voices are screwed until they bring lawsuits and one of them decides to take it to court.
It would be interesting to see how the court treats the excuse "the algorithm made me do it". If they accept it, then it may be time to build an extermination robot designed to kill vermin that's algorithm somehow keeps targeting blue haired land whales.
I gotta say, that a couple of Facebook engineers are charged with defining, for everyone on Earth, things like "hate," "bad," "destructive," "hate speech," "troll" and the like, is one of the funnier things I've seen since a chatbox commenter on one of Vox's Darkstreams called Joe Rogan a mutant strain of wild rice.
My only worry with a class action is that whoever brings it needs to be strict about who the unclaimed payout should go to - particularly who the Cy Press should be, if the unclaimed money isn't distributed to the claiming Class Members.
I can just see someone bringing the case, and then some agreement is made that it goes to either some globohomo charity (getting laundered back into the cabal), goes to some cuckservative organisations as the "nearest possible" recipient (so, the same thing really).
If there is a "right to free speech" there must also be a right to "disagree with free speech". Facebook is just exerting this second right.
I wonder if it's feasible to get the "safe harbor" protections from being treated as publishers that these companies enjoy removed in court by arguing that they don't meet the political neutrality requirements. It should preferably be done legislatively, but Republicans are still too chickenshit and too bought off to do it.
The lawsuits and fundraising efforts that are currently underway against orgs like the SPLC is a great start. Big Tech is taking their marching orders from them. Paypal just admitted as such.
I was part of the OG alt-right FB scene, and this isn't surprising at all. They did crap like this all the time, not to mention outright bans. My old profile (going back to 2006) got perma-deleted for it. Which sucked to lose so many pictures and such, but may have been a blessing in disguise in the new age of digital oppression.
It's time to start building class action lawsuits against Facebook and other social media companies engaged in these false, defamatory, and materially damaging practices. VD
Or build their own platforms. Ok, not being a smartass. Things are getting confusing.
Question: Should non-liberals build their own platforms? or engage these liberals on their own platforms? Or both?
FAANG et. al. delenda est.
Personally, I don't give a fuck what Facebook / Twitter / Google does. They're converged, which means they'll eventually self destruct due to social justice being more important than serving their customers or making money.
VD has said repeatedly that those on the nationalist right need to build their own infrastructure, and is doing that himself as an example to show how it's done. Stop complaining, and either build it yourself or support those who do.
Facebook throttles all public pages, then asks for money to push content to your own audience. I assume it's part of the business plan.
Speaking of social media, Michelle Malkin is out and about complaining that twitter contacted her and told her that a tweet from years ago is in violation of Pakistani law.
Pakistani law can be used against a right winger but can we use foreign law against leftists of the American establishment. Or is the American establishment and its foot soldiers top dog in the globalist dog pack and therefore no one outside of our borders will touch them?
Pertinent to this conversation.
There is also the infamous microcrap update KB4023057.First released in Dec. 2018, it was force fed onto my Lenovo laptop. No one seems to know just what this thing does. I know it, in short order, trashed my laptop. Started as mouse and pad freezing with the only way out to crash the power button. This continued for a week or two until the laptop had had enough and quit. Had to have a computer expert rebuild the machine. Over $100. They re-released it, onto my computer, as of 2/15/19. Did exactly the same thing. On the net, notably at windowslatest.com, there are discussions of this and how it only affect certain computers. I suspect those url's affected were ones that routinely visited 'conservative' sites like this one. Lenovo wanted nothing to do with fixing this laptop though it was still in warranty. No more lenovos for me. My computer guy gave me an iso disk with Deepin on it. I will be migrating the Lenovo to Linux now, and go back to school on Linux. Microsoft can kiss my ass; Lenovo too, for that matter. At the mentioned site there is a fix that involves uninstalling that update and immediately reinstalling it. Supposed to cure the problem. Did not work for me.
Conservatives are going to have to stop settling out of court in ways that prevent them from commenting publicly on their experiences or divulging what they've learned.
Good point. Even if they do keep their agreement with you, that does nothing for everyone else. Since these systems all use algorithms to determine what everyone most wants to see at the top of his feed, there are an unlimited number of ways for them to tinker around under the hood to reduce your footprint. Make them stop using one and they'll have another in place by the afternoon.
Stop complaining, and either build it yourself or support those who do.
It's not binary. It will be easier for new infrastructure to get a foothold if the converged, deep-state-funded infrastructure is fighting off class-action suits and regulators.
Weird direction that may go nowhere, but I have to guess that at least a few of the employees making these decisions are not American citizens.
Not sure a thread like that when pulled leads to anything, but would be an interesting investigation to see if true and if they did have any connections to their origin country governments...
Slightly OTT, but did anyone see that Jared Taylor's books were removed from Amazon? At the end of the press release it is noted that Taylor's Twitter lawsuit is still in the courts.
https://www.amren.com/news/2019/02/press-release-amazon-now-banning-books-based-on-political-content/
The fish rots from the head down. Most of these social media sites are owned/controlled by (((people))) who do not believe in God, have no morals and hate your children; they do not have America's interests at heart. The top executives hire people straight out of university with the same snide political philosophy or from some form of nepotism. They usually are narcissistic and easily manipulated. Couple this with the fact that from their infancy these organizations were heavily funded by the government and you get what we have today: social media, mainstream media, Hollywood, universities and The Bureaucracy all heavily converged and existing only to destroy what is good for America. Meanwhile the very enemy that threatens their decadent lifestyle and wants to kill them is allowed to espouse their views without consequence. I agree the only way forward is to build alternative sights, prepare for darker days and pray to God for salvation as these people will never change their warped Marxist mindset which is their sure road to hell.
As much as it shouldn't, it still surprises me that anyone, anywhere, is more concerned with thousand-dollar Russian ad buys on Facebook -- run-of-the-mill statecraft in current year -- than they are with the global mass-manipulation inherent to the platform, itself.
Appears to be partly projection, and partly a deliberate tactic. If you preemptively accuse someone else of exactly the type of nefarious conduct that you're engaged in, anyone responding by pointing out your crimes just sounds like a "No U!!!" response -- which is rhetorically weak.
Gregory the Great wrote:If there is a "right to free speech" there must also be a right to "disagree with free speech". Facebook is just exerting this second right.
I really hope that was satire.
wahr01 wrote:A properly run GOP would seize upon these 3 items, introduce anti-censorship legislation, and pound on it like the commie brigade do their 'green new deal'.
What makes you think the GOP isn't properly run, as opposed to being run for the benefit of people who aren't you?
Stop depending on politicians whose incentives and interests don't align with yours.
How about both lawsuits and alternative platforms? As in the lawsuit funds the development of the alternative platforms.
MidnightSun300 wrote:The fish rots from the head down. Most of these social media sites are owned/controlled by (((people))) who do not believe in God, have no morals and hate your children; they do not have America's interests at heart. The top executives hire people straight out of university with the same snide political philosophy or from some form of nepotism. They usually are narcissistic and easily manipulated. Couple this with the fact that from their infancy these organizations were heavily funded by the government and you get what we have today: social media, mainstream media, Hollywood, universities and The Bureaucracy all heavily converged and existing only to destroy what is good for America. Meanwhile the very enemy that threatens their decadent lifestyle and wants to kill them is allowed to espouse their views without consequence. I agree the only way forward is to build alternative sights, prepare for darker days and pray to God for salvation as these people will never change their warped Marxist mindset which is their sure road to hell.
There's a petition over at Whitehouse.gov that could make things really uncomfortable.
It's text is:
Dual-Citizenship of Public Officials Creates Conflicts of Interest
Whereas dual citizenship introduces the possibility of divided loyalties we request that the citizenship statuses, current and past, of all Legislators, Executive Appointees, and Federal Judges be made public — all of whom are public officials, and whose day-to-day duties impact the People of the United States and all corporations in the United States.
Moreover, the “Emoluments Clause” (Art 1, Sec 9, Cl 8) clearly prohibits acceptance of presents or emoluments by foreign states to Officers of Profit or Trust, which all the aforementioned are, and the advantages conferred by foreign citizenship may well violate this clause, the purpose of which is clearly anti-corruption, and therefore should be available to public scrutiny to ensure such corruption does not exist.
Settlements and plea bargains violate the precept that not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done.
Facebook makes a great deal of money by matching up buyers and sellers. The more finely and deeply they know those on Facebook, the better they can be served up as targets for advertising. Once Facebook knows what you like and want and think and feel, they know which advertisers to feed you to.
Fortunately or unfortunately, that same intelligence can also be perverse. Facebook also knows who are your friends and who are your enemies.
If they want to promote your activity or product, they can distribute that to your friends and not to your enemies.
If they want to generate fresh complaints and controversy against YOU, because they dislike you or do not agree with your activity or product, they can keep distribution from your friends but include many of your enemies. Once Facebook gets the usual complaints from your enemies, they can use those complaints as evidence to exclude you in the future from their platform. They have engineered your demise, just as they could engineer your success.
Facebook has become the maitre d' for the most public and popular part of the internet. They are the head waiter, host, waiter captain....however you want to say it. They do not cook or prepare any of the food but they man-handle the variety of people who hope to dine there. They manage the reservations, they group the tables and assign the guests to benefit the restaurant, and they know what waiter you will have. In short, they manage your experience, which may be intentionally good or bad, based on what is best for the restaurant and otherwise the maitre d' own tastes and preferences in customers.
If a company will not live up to it's settlement agreements, then those agreements are worthless. Better to take your chances in court than to wind up with nothing.
I wrote this after listening to yesterday's Darkstream on free speech. What I mean is this: If everybody is free to tell lies, be disgusting or blasphemous under the guise of free speech it is no wonder others take the liberty of censoring truth, politeness and faith. If you have no standards anybody can come up with any standard.
Awesome, somethings at YT do work, this appeared in my recommends. SJWAL audio! Thank you; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KriImB2gTH8
Why is FB still a IPO are shareholders aware of all this?
Adorable Diamond and Silk went before a Congress not wanting them to have any money from FB. Nice POTUS ladies, leave them alone. Just like 1996, 2001, 2007, FB will disappear in lost money so I pray.
It has to be more people than Cerno and Crowder. I've heard both presenters I lean towards Cerno due to age and mindset.
Facebook like twitter is where everyone "is" and really its either stress or press at big tech social media.
There is nothing fun at FB and those other places keep rejecting, banning, deboosting, refusing to feature popular people.
Facebook pages for most part are dangerous and requires a separate everything like a library dummy account, its a filthy place and I do not mean the library. The other side of FB are users doing code for immorality and illegality; selling stuff/meet ups, its so idiotic police don't even believe postings but FB is a real and present danger.
Neither men although apart in age and status deserve such unkind treatment but such are online outlets.
What is interesting is how no one tries to help Mike instead they pity Crowder, Glenn Beck has Crowders back, Crowder is another young person trying to make it, he has his show and its good enough, do the content and its all fine.
FB is truly misinformed to stupid in that they just went after a Cali Atty that does not have time for fools.
At youtube Crowder will sometimes appear and I have to look for the latest from Mike, youtube isn't kind towards Mike b/c he is a threat to whomever; white, normal, family guy or its just mere banter, let the courts decide.
Both men are doing their best work intended for them by God. Unfortunately, I do not understand the attraction to Mercury Beck. Crowder doesn't need to be mentioned on Beck's show as he was today.
I do not visit facebook because I believe it gives bugs and viruses, they have corps to sell you the bleach for a virus they gave you, but its my own theory, a flawed one.
However, I would not say the same for SoGal or Social Galactic. (I only heard about that middle of this month.)
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