Facebook is stealthily blocking / hiding posts and post-shares featuring verified information inconvenient to US / UK propaganda

[Delicieuxz]

 

Blocked By Facebook and the Vulnerability of New Media

 

Quote

What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way. The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing – it shows you it is shared – and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you.

 

Twitter have a similar system known as “shadow banning”. Again it is secretive and the victim is not informed. I do not appear to be shadow banned at the moment, but there has been an extremely sharp drop – by a factor of ten – in the impressions my tweets are generating.

 

The person this information comes from, Craig Murray, is a former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan and is probably most known for whistle-blowing US, UK, and Uzbekistan partnership in torturing people in 2005, and then also for delivering the leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 US federal election. Recently, Craig Murray exposed a series of lies the UK government made about a chemical attack that occurred in Salisbury, UK, which resulted in the UK government backtracking on many of its former claims and denying having made some of them despite its own video interviews and social media posts (which the UK government started deleting before that too was called out) proving otherwise.

 

For more detailed coverage of the Craig Murray's recent activity which has likely led to Facebook censoring his content, see my LTT blog post on the subject.

 

 

 

Everything that Craig Murray claimed, ahead of it having public confirmation, has turned out to be the full truth, while virtually every detail of the UK's ever-changing narrative has turned out to be made-up and a part of a propaganda disinformation campaign against Russia. Yet, Facebook had decided to stealth-censor Facebook posts linking to Craig Murray's website.

 

I believe it is inarguable that Facebook's interference in what people share on their Facebook timelines, and Facebook's obstruction and prevention of people sharing verified-to-be-true information on Facebook is Facebook abusing its position to mobilize its own platform to propagandize and disinform the people using it while trying to hide that it is doing so from the people using its platform.

 

Facebook said it was going to combat disinformation, but it appears that claim was a part of Facebook's own propaganda, and that Facebook's own controlled actions actually represent the primary disinformation threat on Facebook. Perhaps Facebook has now become no more than a propaganda megaphone for its management and the intelligence agencies Facebook seems to have aligned itself with.

[Sauron]

Facebook. Is. A. Private. Company.

 

They can do whatever they want when it comes to removing posts they dislike. If you want them to change their policies stop using their service. The only ways they'll ever backtrack are a government investigation (which would be ineffective in this case because as far as I can tell no laws have been broken, and the UK's government stands to gain from this anyway) or a mass exodus of their users.

 

-edit-

also... so much for the "facebook is a leftist company" argument...

[Sniperfox47]

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Facebook. Is. A. Private. Company.

Why do I hear this every time an article like this is brought to light? Things like this serve to inform users. How do you expect to cause a "mass exodus" if we don't inform people of what Facebook is doing?

 

1 minute ago, Nicholatian said:

In the long run, the proactive solution to this is to outcompete them. For crying out loud, they couldn't be more of a slow-moving incumbent that reacts terribly to sudden change. There's no better time to drive a startup to disrupt them! Make a new idea and give people a reason to care about it. Do it before they connive regulation with their political buddies to shut you out entirely.

That's not how social media works. There can't *be* competition in the social media field because network effects pull users together. I mean even in the messenger field, it took *massive* issues to the point of unusability to drive users from Skype to Discord.

[Delicieuxz]

8 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Facebook. Is. A. Private. Company.

 

They can do whatever they want when it comes to removing posts they dislike. If you want them to change their policies stop using their service. The only ways they'll ever backtrack are a government investigation (which would be ineffective in this case because as far as I can tell no laws have been broken, and the UK's government stands to gain from this anyway) or a mass exodus of their users.

 

Private companies are still subject to and judged by certain legal and ethical standards. And the private company of Facebook's product is the people that use its service, and so it not true to say that Facebook is simply Facebook. Facebook is its platform and all the people that use it.

 

There is also such a thing as social responsibility, and nobody has a right to mislead people by hiding the truth from them. 

 

Facebook's actions are also a contradiction of its own public statements about combating disinformation, and its claims to combat disinformation while willfully spreading it and obstructing information that combats disinformation could constitute false advertising and other legal offences.

[Misanthrope]

As Sauron mentions, what would make anybody think that Facebook wouldn't do this? They're a corporation and it's on their best interest to promote the governments that basically allow the to operate and make them a lot of money.

 

This basically comes down to a fundamental issue that underlines things more politically but I won't get into that, but more superficially, the issue is that we have come to embrace private services and rely on them as if they were public services and there is a profound difference between the two.

 

When we came up with the electrical grid, water grid, delivering gas, dividing up radio frequencies, etc. We as a society decided this were public services and public goods that are to be used by all people since they're basic necessities needed by all people.

 

Move forward to 2018 and riddle me this: Do you think you could be able to obtain a decent paying job or anything above an entry level position at a service industry without an email address? Yet where can you go to have a public access email address? You usually need to go to one of these private companies be it your ISP or a giant like Google, yahoo, Microsoft, etc. And they'll make you think 'Oh, it's just something they give out for free it's available for anybody!'

 

Yet is it really? Is it if we know that email can be monitored and censored according to their private interest?

 

The same can be said for social networks: they're so popular they're basically ubiquitous now, a necessity for almost all members of civilized western societies that aspire to at least a modest lower middle class income. Yet we were happy to leave this very important tools in the hands of 100% private interests. This is the price to pay now: we effectively depend on corporations and there is no idea of public good when it comes to social media.

[Sniperfox47]

1 minute ago, Nicholatian said:

You say there can't be competition and turn 180º to cite an example of ground-shaking competition in social media... there's evidently something huge you're not evaluating here, because you just proved yourself wrong.

...that's not competition, that's users jumping off a burning ship.

 

Competition is when you have two platforms actively working to make users make a choice between them. Currently Skype and Discord serve completely different market segments, and a lot of users who are part of both market segments just use both.

 

WhatsApp, Messenger, Kik, Discord, Skype, and others don't "compete" because users who are served by multiple market segments just wind up with multiple messengers.

[Arika]

20 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Facebook. Is. A. Private. Company.

This.

 

and before anyone tries to bring up that this is in breach of the first amendment, it was ruled by the supreme court that facebook (and google) don't qualify for first amendment protections. you're free to post what ever the hell you want, but they are also free to remove it whenever they want.

 

If you've been following the news in the UK, then you would already know that free speech was burnt to the ground and it's ashes scattered 

[Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

Well then I guess it's not larceny, it's just taking another man's trash! It can't be piracy, because there's one for each of us. It's definitely not manslaughter, the guy I ran over wasn't really a person anyways. So everything is hunky dory, right? You see how asinine this notion is?

 

You can connive an endless number of reasons why it's not possible, and that'll leave you with the status quo that we're in with the public private delimma. I'm not happy with that, I don't think people are either, so if you don't think it can be changed I'd be happy to take a stab at changing it.

Thank you for taking a snippet completely out of the context of the sentence following it that explains my point and using that to argue me, rather than using the actual point I was making.

 

A service being replaced by another is not competition, since you're moving from one monopoly to another.

 

Services existing side by side and serving totally different market segments is not competition, since they don't create any selective pressures on each other.

 

Please though, if you feel you can take a stab at making a market incumbent to Facebook, please do. Please prove me wrong, I would love for that to happen.

 

Mastadon is technically superior to Twitter in every way, and do you know how many users it's pulled away from Twitter during the "mass exodus"? <0.01%. And that's assuming that every single mastodon user has stopped using Twitter, which considering how many Mastodon users have Twitter links in their profiles is doubtful.

 

 

[Sauron]

40 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Why do I hear this every time an article like this is brought to light? Things like this serve to inform users. How do you expect to cause a "mass exodus" if we don't inform people of what Facebook is doing?

The article isn't worded as a PSA, it's an outrage piece crying censorship where none exists, not legally at the very least. Anyone who cares already knows facebook can and will remove anything they dislike and there's nothing you can do about it except leave.

39 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

Private companies are still subject to and judged by certain legal and ethical standards. And the private company of Facebook's product is the people that use its service, and so it not true to say that Facebook is simply Facebook. Facebook is its platform and all the people that use it.

Legally it's completely in their right to do this. I don't like it, but then there are soooo many things I don't like about facebook - and yet it's still massively popular. If you want someone to blame, blame the legislators who have been in facebook's favour pockets all this time, looking the other way in front of blatant monopoly and privacy violation; blame the complacency of those who understand what is going on and say nothing; blame the apathy of those who don't care because "they have nothing to hide". Forgive me if I find it a little absurd that this guy believes he can use a private site as a free platform, for his political messages, regardless of what he has to say.

39 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

There is also such a thing as social responsibility, and nobody has a right to mislead people by hiding the truth from them. 

 

Facebook's actions are also a contradiction of its own public statements about combating disinformation, and its claims to combat disinformation while willfully spreading it and obstructing information that combats disinformation could constitute false advertising and other legal offences.

Moral considerations, irrelevant in front of the law. I agree they are acting immorally, but outrage won't change that. The UK right now has far greater problems if you ask me, this is a symptom - not the cause, nor the issue itself. As I said, if you want to get at facebook the only way is to stop using their services.

[straight_stewie]

I don't think this is censorship. No matter what you post, only the people in your graph that Facebook thinks will be interested in that thing see it. It happens to all posts (unless you pay for it to be an ad), and it's not purposefully malicious.

To see how this works, find a friend in your friend list that you haven't interacted with in a long time. Perhaps one that you forgot was there. Now, spend a few days making sure to comment on their posts or reply to their comments on other posts. After a few days, facebook will once again start notifying you of their posts. You can even be scrolling through your wall and see a header on a post "<insert friend name> commented on this post" (where before, you may not have seen the post at all). You will also notice their posts magically appearing on your wall, where before they weren't there.

The reason the guys "friends" don't see his posts is because, well, they aren't actually his friends.

[Cookybiscuit]

35 minutes ago, Sierra Fox said:

This.

 

and before anyone tries to bring up that this is in breach of the first amendment, it was ruled by the supreme court that facebook (and google) don't qualify for first amendment protections. you're free to post what ever the hell you want, but they are also free to remove it whenever they want.

 

If you've been following the news in the UK, then you would already know that free speech was burnt to the ground and it's ashes scattered 

It doesn't mean it's not a shitty service because of it. The LTT forum is well within their rights to delete every post that shows Nvidia and Intel in a positive light and only allow pro-AMD news/posts, but it would be a tech shitty forum if that were the case. Just like how Facebook doing this makes it a shitty place to read about politics, amongst a lot of other far more important reasons of course.

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, Delicieuxz said:

Spoiler

This information comes from Craig Murray, who is a former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan. Craig has been in the news some recently because of his blasting apart many of the lies the UK government was pushing about the Salisbury, UK chemical attack. Craig Murray used to work in the UK's Foreign & Commonwealth Office, which communicates with the UK's Porton Down chemical weapons facility that analyzed samples of the Salisbury chemical agent and reported its findings to the UK government.

 

The UK government had tried to propagandize the public against Russia by claiming that its Porton Down chemical facility had verified the Salisbury chemical agent to have come from Russia. But because Craig Murray still has contacts within the FCO, and because he knew by first-hand experience from his time as a UK diplomat the type of manipulation and deception that goes on behind the scenes with government narratives that aim to bias public opinion towards or against an objective, he reached out to his FCO contacts about the Salisbury "Novichok" chemical agent, and heard that what the UK government was telling the public was a lie - the Porton Down facility had been completely unable to identify the source of the chemical used in the Salisbury attack.

 

It has also since been verified by many  sources that almost any country is capable of making "Novichok", a chemical whose recipe has been publicly available since the mid 1990s (using the Look Inside feature, it's on page 449) and which has been researched by many EU countries since 1999, and which is known to have been produced by Iran in 2016. And the UK and US have both made it, while the US even patented weaponized "Novichok" in 2015.

 

Many of these details were brought to light by Craig Murray, who is a former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, where Novichok was developed and tested. Craig Murray had also visited the Uzbekistan facility during its dismantling, which was done by the USA in 1999, with the US becoming responsible for the facility's housed remaining stockpiles of chemical agents, to dispose or do otherwise with them.

 

As a result of Craig's reporting the truth, the UK government was cornered into admitting it had been lying to everybody when it said that any analysis had confirmed Russia to be responsible. The UK government was then caught lying about its earlier lying about the Salisbury agent, and was also caught deleting a Twitter post in which the UK government asserted that Porton Down had verified the Salisbury agent to have come from Russia.

 

https://www.rt.com/uk/423075-porton-down-skripal-proof/

https://www.rt.com/uk/423162-russia-poison-government-twitter/

https://www.rt.com/uk/424478-skripal-opcw-origin-poison/

 

Craig Murray also reported on the internal negotiations between the UK government and Porton Down, where the UK government had coerced Porton Down into signing-off use of the phrase 'of a type developed by Russia' when describing the Salisbury attack agent - which was designed to manipulate and connive the public into assuming that the Salisbury agent came from Russia, despite the only semi-accurate meaning of 'of a type developed by Russia' being that it could refer to the fact that the USSR originally developed the "Novichok" class of chemicals.

 

The UK government thought that so long as 'of a type developed by Russia' had almost a sliver of truth to it, that that would make it permissible to use to convince the public of a wholly different understanding: That it implied the Salisbury agent had any kind of association with Russia. Of course, the "Novichok" family of chemicals wasn't developed by Russia, either, but by the USSR - so the UK government and Porton Down's agreed 'of a type developed by Russia' phrase was a lie, no matter which way it's looked at.

 

 

 

Everything that Craig Murray claimed, ahead of it having public confirmation, turned out to be the full truth, while virtually every detail of the UK's ever-changing narrative has turned out to be made-up and a part of a propaganda disinformation campaign against Russia. Yet, Facebook had decided to stealth-censor Facebook posts linking to Craig Murray's website.

 

Is this a thread about Facebook, or is this a thread about the chemical attack on British soil? The vast majority of your post is not needed or relevant to the discussion. You could have just said "The person making these claims about Facebook censorship is promoting and publishing information conspiracy theories regarding the chemical attack in England" and kept the rest of the discussion to the issue regarding Facebook censoring what its algorithms detects to be misinformation. At least put it in a spoiler tag.

People complain when Facebook allows fake news. People complain when Facebook censor fake news. What are you going to do? If you don't like the way Facebook is operating - don't use it.

[Delicieuxz]

2 hours ago, Spotty said:

Is this a thread about Facebook, or is this a thread about the chemical warfare attack on British soil? The vast majority of your post is not needed or relevant to the discussion. You could have just said "The person making these claims about Facebook censorship is promoting and publishing information conspiracy theories regarding the chemical attack in England" and kept the rest of the discussion to the issue regarding Facebook censoring what its algorithms detects to be misinformation.

People complain when Facebook allows fake news. People complain when Facebook censor fake news. What are you going to do? If you don't like the way Facebook is operating - don't use it.

All of Criag Murray's reported information about "Novichok" has become verified in the public space. So, if I claimed Craig Murray was pushing conspiracy theories, I would then be a liar.

 

Craig Murray received the Sam Adams Integrity in Intelligence award in 2005 for whistle-bowing that the US, UK, and Uzbekistan governments were working together to retrieve information through torture techniques - a conscientious action that saw him removed from his post as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan as the UK government labelled his whistle-blowing "misconduct". Some other SA Integrity in Intelligence awardees include Edward Snowden, Seymour Hersh, Bill Binney, and Chelsea Manning.

 

Craig Murray is also who he and WikiLeaks claim to have delivered the leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

 

It is a conspiracy theory to claim that Craig pushes conspiracy theories.

[Arika]

6 hours ago, Cookybiscuit said:

It doesn't mean it's not a shitty service because of it. The LTT forum is well within their rights to delete every post that shows Nvidia and Intel in a positive light and only allow pro-AMD news/posts, but it would be a tech shitty forum if that were the case. Just like how Facebook doing this makes it a shitty place to read about politics, amongst a lot of other far more important reasons of course.

Oh I know. I hate Facebook with a passion. But people here and around the internet have been throwing the word illegal around just because they dont like something like it's going out of style that I feel it's starting to lose meaning. People need to come up with actual arguments than "well this is illegal"

[jagdtigger]

22 hours ago, Nicholatian said:

and give people a reason to care about it

The vast majority wont care about anything unless it affects them directly in the physical world. Just look at the carelessness ppl showing about FB's latest scandal for instance. Its both sad and infuriating....

[asus killer]

the privacy issues are different because there are laws (at least were i live) and can be illegal. This is just people whining, it's private and more than that it's free. Don't like it don't use it. Besides newspapers and tv do this/did this all the time.

[Ryujin2003]

22 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Why do I hear this every time an article like this is brought to light? Things like this serve to inform users. How do you expect to cause a "mass exodus" if we don't inform people of what Facebook is doing?

Because this information comes out, and only a very small portion of the users care. Delete Facebook lasted how long? How many of the masses changed the way they use the platform?

 

You hear it because nothing changes... If you don't like it, then switch.. or stay until the next thing happens, get mad, and stay again until the next one....

 

 

Users may be informed but setting is users if your friends stay... And then all of your stuff is here, so it's just easier to stay in FB, and trust that they won't consistently screw over their user base.

[Okjoek]

On 4/27/2018 at 10:15 AM, Sauron said:

-edit-

 leftist company

That's pretty much always an oxymoron unless said company is owned by the state or some other communal organization that's not strictly profit based.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, Okjoek said:

That's pretty much always an oxymoron unless said company is owned by the state or some other communal organization that's not strictly profit based.

If only everyone could see that...