Headline:Facebook and Google Struggle to Squelch ‘Crisis Actor’ Posts
From the Operation Mockingbird classic New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — On Wednesday, one week after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., Facebook and YouTube vowed to crack down on the trolls.
Well doesn't that sound great? How noble, everyone hates trolls right? Of course in this case they have defined "trolls" like most people do online, as anyone who disagrees with them. So when they say "trolls" in this article they mean those who dispute their carefully crafted narratives.
Thousands of posts and videos had popped up on the sites, falsely claiming that survivors of the shooting were paid actors or part of various conspiracy theories. Facebook called the posts “abhorrent.” YouTube, which is owned by Google, said it needed to do better. Both promised to remove the content.
So let me get this right, if you question the false narrative we are being sold, that is abhorrent to those who have appointed themselves the arbiters of what may be said online in the largest social media networks. Dissent is abhorrent to them and must be "squelched".
The companies have since aggressively pulled down many posts and videos and reduced the visibility of others. Yet on Friday, spot searches of the sites revealed that the noxious content was far from eradicated.
The NYT just complained that these companies are not doing a good enough job suppressing speech and dissenting opinions. Wow, theories about the president illegally colluding with Russia are front page in the NYT but theories about kids in the drama club who read scripted questions from CNN being actors are "abhorrent" and "noxious".
On Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, searches for the hashtag #crisisactor, which accused the Parkland survivors of being actors, turned up hundreds of posts perpetuating the falsehood (though some also criticized the conspiracy theory). Many of the posts had been tweaked ever so slightly — for example, videos had been renamed #propaganda rather than #hoax — to evade automated detection. And on YouTube, while many of the conspiracy videos claiming that the students were actors had been taken down, other videos that claimed the shooting had been a hoax remained rife.
If these claims are blatantly false, why make any effort to suppress them? The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Facebook faced renewed criticism on Friday after it was revealed that the company showcased a virtual reality shooting game at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week. Facebook said it was removing the game from its demonstration of its new virtual reality products.
It faced renewed criticism on Friday from who? Who is upset that there is not enough censorship? So let me get this right, video games in no way contribute to shooting sprees but Facebook should remove a video game also, in addition to anyone suggesting that the narrative that these children and not Soros sponsored political groups are actually coming up with all this on their own and not reading the scripts provided by CNN and others. It is clearly false that students are leading or organizing these activities, it is clear that they are being used as mouthpieces.
The resilience of misinformation, despite efforts by the tech behemoths to eliminate it, has become a real-time case study of how the companies are constantly a step behind in stamping out the content. At every turn, trolls, conspiracy theorists and others have proved to be more adept at taking advantage of exactly what the sites were created to do — encourage people to post almost anything they want — than the companies are at catching them.
Interesting, they used to be about distributing content, now they are about stamping it out. Thank God they are stamping out content so that we don't have to be confused or upset by it right? Note the terms "trolls" and "conspiracy theorists" , those are terrible people who don't have free speech right?
“They’re not able to police their platforms when the type of content that they’re promising to prohibit changes on a too-frequent basis,” Jonathon Morgan, founder of New Knowledge, a company that tracks disinformation online, said of Facebook and YouTube.
Of course it's not really disinformation they oppose, its anything that opposes their disinformation. In this case they are trying to conflate those saying that these kids are professionals who have been at other shootings with anyone who points out that they are reading from scripts and that these demonstrations are not anything like student-led but are in fact being handled by large anti civil rights organizations and entities.
The difficulty of dealing with inappropriate online content stands out with the Parkland shooting because the tech companies have effectively committed to removing any accusations that the Parkland survivors were actors, a step they did not take after other recent mass shootings, such as last October’s massacre in Las Vegas. In the past, the companies typically addressed specific types of content only when it was illegal — posts from terrorist organizations, for example — Mr. Morgan said.
But now I guess that is not good enough, now anything that questions the official fake news narrative is "inappropriate" and must be removed from public view.
Facebook and YouTube’s promises follow a stream of criticism in recent months over how their sites can be gamed to spread Russian propaganda, among other abuses. The companies have said they are betting big on artificial intelligence systems to help identify and take down inappropriate content, though that technology is still being developed.
The censorship will be automated, won't that be wonderful? Once again they mention criticism without mentioning the critics.
The companies have in the meantime hired or said they plan to hire more people to comb through what is posted to their sites. Facebook said it was hiring 1,000 new moderators to review content and was making changes to what type of news publishers would be favored on the social network. YouTube has said that it plans to have 10,000 moderators by year’s end and that it is altering its search algorithms to return more videos from reliable news sources.
In other words they will be pulling out all the stops to ensure they have an echo chamber that does not contradict "reliable news sources", lemme guess, the reliable sources are fakenews CNN the NYT and Washington Post. If only there was some sort of decentralized place you could post content without centralized political censorship.
Mary deBree, head of content policy at Facebook, said the company had not been perfect at staving off certain content and most likely would not be in the future.
“False information is like any other challenge where humans are involved: It evolves, much like a rumor or urban legend would. It also masks itself as legitimate speech,” she said. “Our job is to do better at keeping this bad content off Facebook without undermining the reason people come here — to see things happening in the world around them and have a conversation about them.”
So they have taken down all the articles about 17 intelligence agencies and 18 school shootings right?
False information is legitimate speech. Note there is nothing in the first amendment that says it protects only the truth. The problem here is that they are acting as if Facebook or YouTube have the ability to determine the truth, as if they can decide what is true or not. The problem here is that politics are involved, look at how Google decided that the truth is that Abe Lincoln was not a republican:
We are supposed to trust these people to determine what is true and then delete everything else?
A YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement that the site updated its harassment policy last year “to include hoax videos that target the victims of these tragedies. Any video flagged to us that violates this policy is reviewed and then removed.”
That's interesting and specific, how can they know what is a hoax or not?
For many people, getting around Facebook and YouTube’s hunt to remove noxious content is straightforward. The sites have automated detection systems that often search for specific terms or images that have previously been deemed unacceptable. So to evade those systems, people sometimes can alter images or switch to different terminology.
Facebook and YouTube are private commercial ventures and they totally have the right to suppress political opinions they don't like but it is also alarming that they have so much influence and have chosen to become tools to suppress certain political speech. What is misleading here is the suggestion that what is being suppressed is inherently "noxious" and "unacceptable" and not just contrary to a political narrative.
Sam Woolley, an internet researcher at the nonprofit Institute for the Future, said far-right groups had started using internet brands to describe minorities — like “Skype” to indicate Jewish people — to trick software and human reviewers.
So in other words they have been suppressing discussions of Jewish people automatically? Look how they label racists as "far right" because everyone knows only those on the right are racist right?
Those who post conspiracy theories also tend to quickly repost or engage with similar posts from other accounts, creating a sort of viral effect that can cause the sites’ algorithms to promote the content as a trending topic or a recommended video, said David Carroll, a professor at the New School who studies tech platforms.
In other words, "sometimes these videos are popular and that is bad"
That duplication and repackaging of misinformation “make the game of snuffing it out Whac-a-Mole to the extreme,” he said.
It's funny because the method employed in Operation Mockingbird was the duplication and repackaging of misinformation.
That game played out across the web in the past few days, after a video suggesting that one of the most vocal Parkland survivors, David Hogg, was an actor became the No. 1 trending video on YouTube. After a public outcry, YouTube removed the video and said it would take down other “crisis actor” videos because they violated its ban on bullying. YouTube has since scrubbed its site of many such videos.
LOL now conspiracy theories are "bullying"! "a public outcry" from whom?
Yet some of the videos remained, possibly because they used slightly different terminology. One clip that had drawn more than 77,000 views by Friday described the shooting survivors as “disaster performers” instead of “crisis actors.”
Here is how free speech works: it is a marketplace of ideas, if you let everyone say their piece then the best ideas will prevail. There is no need to try to suppress things that are untrue because the truth will do that.
Other videos that were not about the Parkland survivors but that called the entire shooting into question also stayed online. A video posted last week by Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy theory site Infowars, titled “Red Alert! Evidence Mounts Florida Attacks Is a Giant False Flag” had attracted more than 300,000 views by Friday.
Is the idea that that video should also have been taken down or is this supposed to be evidence that they are not suppressing free speech?
On Facebook, some of the posts the social network had vowed to ban were still gaining traction. One lengthy post had been shared more than 3,800 times by early Friday. The post included a photo of Mr. Hogg and his classmate Emma Gonzalez with the text “Globalist Deep State Crisis Actors.”
They are actors who are working to promote the goals of the deep state globalists, if the shoe fits...
After The New York Times contacted the author of the post, a self-described political analyst named John Miranda, the post disappeared. It is unclear if Facebook removed it. Mr. Miranda did not respond to a request for comment.
I guess the NYT is doxing anyone who questions the official narrative here.
The tech companies’ increasing efforts to remove misinformation have a side effect: angering some of their most active users.
Orwell would be impressed, calling censorship, "efforts to remove misinformation", gosh how could anyone be angered by that?
Moe Othman, a comedian and commentator on YouTube who has about 60,000 subscribers, said that within 10 minutes of posting a video on Wednesday that suggested some Parkland students were actors, YouTube removed it and placed a strike on his account. YouTube terminates accounts after three strikes.
Looks like he needs to be on Dtube. I wonder how many videos about Donald Trump and Russian prostitutes have been removed and their producers given "strikes".
Mr. Othman said in a private message on Twitter: “I’m not surprised. We live in a world where information is one of the most important tools.” He added, “In this case, I see YouTube as a censoring machine.”
Wow, twitter better give that guy a shadow ban.
Would he stop using YouTube? No, he said, “mainly because I’m still a comedian who simply wants to make people laugh.”
This story actually made me happy, clearly they are very concerned that this fragile narrative of a student led effort against firearms being organic falling apart and are desperately doing damage control. These kids don't have to be paid or be at different shootings to be actors, they just have to be reading a script to promote a political goal in the wake of a crisis. And that is not a conspiracy theory that is a conspiracy fact, CNN was busted handing out scripts to these useful idiots. Thank God for steemit.com and the blockchain having the ability to preserve things for all time and to avoid corporate and government censorship of ideas and monopoly on truth.
What do you think?
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