Yesterday, this post of mine was removed from TikTok for a while:
Apparently, it violated rules by encouraging hate speech. I appealed, explaining that it was calling for ethical politics based on compassion-based convictions, and it was restored.
This morning, I had a warning from Facebook that this post in which I discuss the Tory manifesto costings might also encourage hate speech:
Far-right thought and deep misogyny thrive on these sites. But I am getting warnings for providing reasoned political comment.
What is going on?
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Any video about or from main political parties could generate hate speech.
I hate what they are doing.
There is no ‘free speech’ in the mass media, social or mainstream, of the Collective West.
Overton Window, Narrative Manufacture and Management, Nudging, Propaganda Multipliets, Gate Keepers and ‘sheepdogs’ … to keep the Left/Right fragmentation ever increasing. As the Top panics and tries to keeps tha Below disoriented, ignorant and fighting between itself with ever increasing neo-religious belief system reinventions. I refer everyone to most of Chomsky and co’s works over the decades.
We have actual government departments with their jolly public school humourless Names – Instititute of Statecraft , integrity initiative… etc and the major Money backers who pull the strings. They cooperate across the whole 5 Eyes and associated satraps. But are losing the grip evermore daily – being forced into knee jerk draconianism, the fake mask dropping. Revealing the hoary fangs and devilish features.
They apply wrist slaps designed to keep honest opinion and free speech from messing their PR spiffy Narratives unsullied. Idiots that they are.
This is just the beginning of the dawning of the truth phase for the Many. We who live in the make believe supposed ‘free speech’, Waste.
I have repeatedly reported profoundly disgusting and false Islamophobic adverts and posts on FB. Not one was taken down, all ‘did not violate’. Contrarywise, my post suggesting Tory politicians who’d failed the country should be tried and even ridiculed publicly in the village stocks (eggs supplied) was subject to a warning and a removal.
HI Richard,
Facebook is moderated by elements of the US security services, has been for a long time. TikTok is probably trying to fit in as US and EU are desperate to ban it because they are unable to censor it and cannot get at the data to sell on.
Regards
Looks as if automated systems scanning for signs of hate have been poorly trained, or else you’re riling people with vested interests (as Jeremy Corbyn did). Interesting.
“What is going on?”
You are upsetting people – quiet words are being had – hence the action.
This is most useful & shows that the powers ranged against citizens are formidable, far reaching and do not want alternative narrative or even questions being asked.
You mentioned comment trolls on your own blog a while back – this is another tool they can use, making false reports to web platform owners. Also, sites like tiktok are known to use voice-to-text scanners to look for known “bad phrases” and then restrict videos, maybe their system mis-heard something you said.
There is little you can do about this, but it serves to show the importance of owning your own site, and mainly using those big platforms as distribution channels.
Last year on Facebook an American friend put up a series of posts of philosophers and quotes.
He put one of Satre the French philosopher.
I said a few things including ‘it was the fags that killed him.’ -meaning of course his addiction to tobacco.
That was dubbed ‘hate speech’. I did have it over turned.
Then earlier this year I put up the final scene from Black Adder and that was taken down with a comment it was looking for cheap laughs. I protested and heard nothing.
It is probably censorship in some cases-things critical of Israel but is also ignorance.
Go for the hat-trick – say something which would piss off Elon!
🙂
Actually it’s none of these things, it’s just Facebook is broken. I run groups on FB one of which is highly politically-oriented and repeatedly we suffer decision-making by FB which appears so incomprehensible as to be lunatic. An appeal might succeed, might not. A lot of it comes, I suspect, from FB’s practice of having moderators, cheap moderators, trying to moderate posts in their third or fourth languages. We’ve opened up a fallback group on MeWe in case it gets too bad. It comes in waves, we’ve noticed, but we don’t know why as yet. TikTok I have no idea about, I don’t really use it.
I think you’re falling foul of AI or lack of understanding of the English language on behalf of moderators. I got flagged for hate speech for using a slang term for a cigarette once. It was distressing to be flagged in that way given the context in which the word was used, because I was talking about cigarettes. My appeal was rejected.
Do you regard yourself as a subversive?
No
Decidedly mainstream
Gramsci and Foucault would be having a field day over ths.
Not sure if Overton would be too happy either to see his window blacked out either.
Gramsci’s idea is that there is a “war of position” in civil society that reinforces the values of the sectional interest of the dominant elite – currently corporate capitalism.
This then suppresses challenge in order to prevent change of the necessary entrenched and widespread ways of thinking and acting.
For example – the mantra of “household economics”, and the presumption in favour of a small state with a low regulatory regime.
Richard’s use of the word “convictions’ will certainly have triggered the thought police.
Supposedly neutral social media platforms are basically corporate capitalists and regularly promote “practices, attitudes and beliefs that obstruct or inhibit progress towards a fairer, greener, happier, less divided and more democratic social order” as a Guardian letter writer recently put it.
I had three posts removed from Facebook yesterday. One of them was a link to an academic journal article, originally posted by Eric Topol, providing important information on COVID-19! I have ‘appealed’ but previous requests for review have fallen on deaf ears. Sinister…
There needs to be a Public Service Social Media platform, algorithm free and planned from the bottom up. Trying to sort out the tech giants awful products by regulation is hopeless. Just find out what people actually want and involve them in delivering it, and it’d be ‘problem solved’.
It already exists: the fediverse. I’ve been on Mastodon for a couple of years now, Richard posts there too. An infinitely better experience than Twitter.
I would argue that there already exists a public service social platform – that is the web. Anyone can buy a domain, make a website, blog, a comment section, and as Steve Jones notes you can even set up social platforms of your own like mastodon.
The challenge is making the underlying infrastructure truly accessible to the public, because for a decade+ a small number of private platforms have been people’s only experience of the web. There’s been an idea floating around tech circles for sometime now of a “public service internet”, though what form that would take seems to be different for everyone. Libraries offering people free tech classes? Funding for access to local fediverse/search/email platforms? A license fee for the internet that gets used to set up free cloud hosting for individual users and small businesses? And if you have truly public service (government-owned?) internet, how do you handle hateful content and balance it with freedom of speech? I moderate online spaces and just this week had an experience (I shall spare you the details) which reminds me that sometimes you do need a ban hammer you can bring down fast to protect everyone, even if that does risk legit content sometimes being taken down too.
Social media companies have the power and right to censor. They weren’t given this power. They have assumed that they have it and don’t want the government to take it away.
They and their fans are the first to cry ‘censorship’ when anyone questions their authority.
Mad, bad and dangerous to know – the social media monopolists. If anyone hasn’t read “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff might I suggest it’s worth a read. (Among her influences she lists – via Wiki – Marx, Durkheim….Sartre)
Love the headline “Politicians need to be people with convictions”
Like Donald Trump ………..? 🙂
Once experience is captured (created)on a computer platform it can be operated on and controlled.
Simply put sorted, merged, amended, deleted, rewritten, analysed. Conditions/cases raised, coded for, exceptions reported ad-infinitum.
“We” are busy creating an integrated box like system of experience which is rapidly capturing the emoted (huge swathes of people). It is remorsless and ever expanding.
This must be self-system regulated and mastered by ethical rules and perhaps country specific laws.
This is not conspiracy but more a naturally evolving new law subject only to a long term power outage and has to be accepted as such for all who speak at “the Thing”.