Social media censorship roundup

[Undertoad]

They don't. So why is Facebook suppressing opinions? I'll tell ya....

I liked this part of the story:

As part of its compliance with US law, the Facebook spokesperson said the company removes accounts run by or on behalf of sanctioned people and organizations.

It also removes posts that commend the actions of sanctioned parties and individuals and seek to help further their actions, the spokesperson said, adding that Facebook has an appeals process if users feel their posts were removed in error.

Critical reading: "removing accounts run by or on behalf of sanctioned people and organizations" = required

"[removing] posts that commend the actions of sanctioned parties and individuals" = not required, but they do it "also".

Why?

Here's a real world example from 2019. 1) YouTube gets bad press because stories say it has Nazis. 2) YouTube advertisers panic. 3) YouTube modifies its algorithm to demonetize, and never recommend, all videos that contain the word "Nazi". 4) All history-teaching and anti-Nazi videos that mention the word are demonetized and never recommended.

Worst possible outcome. But Youtube can't algorithmically detect which videos are Nazi and which are anti-Nazi. Way easier to just shadowban them all.

If anyone is interested, here is a very stylish and entertaining video that details the Youtube approach to keywords. They have thousands of keywords! The investigators found, for example, that a video title with the words "gay" and "homosexual" would be automatically demonetized, but "straight" and "heterosexual" were fine.

OUR DISCOURSE IS NOW CONTROLLED BY SHITTY ALGORITHMS. This is a disaster.