[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Mainstream conservatives are still uncomfortable with direct, outright racism, but they're mostly fine with the systemic kind, because they really believe that non-whites are inferior and their failures to navigate society's systems are theirs, not society's. They're willing to accept non-whites that manage to prosper, but the ones that do poorly are human wreckage to be jettisoned if possible. (Poor whites are mostly salvageable, just 'down on their luck'.)

The far right are actual Nazis in all but name. Groups like the Proud Boys are militant white supremacists, and they have a lot of backing from many police departments.

edit to add: Radical leftists have so little power that they're barely worth a mention right now. Like Quintin_Stone, I mostly think of those as the kind are that willing to use violence to get what they want. His examples all fit that definition exactly. Ones that commit property damage probably also qualify, but when they're not putting lives in jeopardy, I think of that as less radical. (Murals on public walls definitely don't qualify.)

To the right, the 'radical leftist' is a made-up monster, where they pick out individual loathsome behaviors by individual people and say that every leftist supports and wants this kind of behavior. There are essentially zero of these in the real world, because they're fictional.

The left does this with the right as well, but with far more justification, because of groups like the Proud Boys. They're not being rejected by the rest of the conservatives, and are being supported by the police, so the supposition that most Republicans are just fine with them doesn't seem too far off the mark. They might make a face, but won't actually do anything. It's a whole lot of Susan Collinses, being concerned.

OK, now FB is feeding me random videos as part of the redesign that they think I want to watch. Including a traffic stop where an officer shatters the driver side window, 4 officers drag the driver out, then proceed to sit on him. 10k likes. I reported it as graphic violent content and blocked the user (a right wing news site?). WTF. Hope the driver was OK.

I don't think I've encountered any nazbols in the wild, but I assume they're out there somewhere. Tankies aren't particularly common either, though at least I've seen a couple online. There's generally a few people who will go around whitewashing atrocities when they're committed by communist countries...which are mostly but not entirely historical, since there's a shortage of actual communist countries right now, outside of China. You do get the occasional apologist for China who wants to minimize their ongoing genocides.

Posadists are mostly a joke on the same level as "Giant Meteor 2020" campaign signs. (The name comes from thinking that dolphins should replace humans.)

Antifa are pretty nebulous but also pretty focused on the anti-fascism thing.

Left-wing anti-globalists are a thing, as are eco-terrorists. They haven't been a large part of the American context these past few years though, at least to my knowledge.

Actual anarchists are more likely to be supporting Food Not Bombs and suchlike.

On the other hand, I've encountered plenty of solidly mainstream Republicans who are fine with outright racism as long as its behind closed doors and not in front of the ladies.

Anti government groups like the Bundys are active domestic terrorists, and I've run into Finicum-Martyr people. On an airplane. Try wearing an "Osama Bin-Laden was a martyr" t-shirt to the airport and see how that works out for you. The Nazi groups like Atomwaffen have been actively hunting down and killing people for years at this point. The Proud Boys have killed people too, though more haphazardly.

The mix of antigovernmental "patriot" movements on the right has lead to a thing where some Proud Boys / Boogaloo movement people were involved in the George Floyd protests and killing cops while being about as far from left-wing as you can get.

Eco-fascism is growing but, again, hasn't taken root in the American landscape. (We're mostly still in denial.)

Far right groups like the John Britch Society are pretty tame right-wing conspiracy nuts at this point--though that may say more about how many moderates have left the right. The QAnon-"save the children" thing might have overtaken them in terms of foundational conspiracy nuts, partially because it operates as a relief valve for the cognitive dissonance of realizing something is wrong with society. Right-wing anti-human-trafficking movements have mostly actually been excuses to punish sex workers, so I'm not surprised to see that incorporated into the whole shebang.

White supremacists have been getting really bold in general.

Far-right evangelicals have been trending more militant, though they prefer to take the state's power and use it to start the war that ends the world while persecuting people who don't fit into their idea of society. Which is why the land-owning white people get so worked up about hetrosexuality: anything that threatens their ability to pass on their property to blood-related children is a problem. Their children being gay means that they might not get grandchildren. It's not necessarily a logical thought process, more of an atavistic response. Christianity is just an excuse. It's a deep trend in American culture: Henry Ford pushed American Schools to include square dancing in an attempt to make the children be straight. Which leads to the panicked conservative op-ed published today about there being too many lesbians who don't have children.

Speaking from having been in it, they're obsessed with having more babies, ostensibly for conversion purposes but it often looks like they just want to make sure that their young people know their place in society. (Which is get married at 21 and have children. Some want young people to have children to convert to the Lᴏʀᴅ, some because they're scared that "civilized" white people are going to get replaced. An uncomfortable number say "Christian" but mean "well-behaved white child".)

The evangelical obsession with having lots of adoptions has a far darker root: it's about converting the children to particular beliefs, even if that requires stealing the children from their parents. It's why they're not worked up about the hundreds of children at the border who will never see their parents again: deep down, they think those children should be adopted by a white Christian (evangelical, of course) heterosexual couple. (Never mind that the parents they stole the children from are mostly Catholic.)

DeVos is weirdly involved in the adoptions of children stolen at the border, but, then, she's also big on protecting rapists and is involved in the part of the charter school movement that's about excluding gays and keeping black children in their place, so it's not really a surprise that she'd participate in active genocide too.

Coverage of the recent Justice Department suit against Google introduced me to a site I didn't know about previously: myactivity.google.com. This will give you a comprehensive list of all the data Google has collected from you across various platforms, and allow you to delete or opt-out of various collection avenues. I'm fortunate that I have a relatively unused Google account and don't use most of their services, but it's nice that they've exposed this and give users a choice.

Arizona woman who destroyed Target mask display was in grips of QAnon: ‘I went down a spiral that resulted in my very public implosion’

The Arizona woman who demolished a Target store’s pandemic mask display in a viral video last July says the conspiracy cult known as QAnon fueled her “spectacular” public breakdown.

Melissa Rein Lively, 35, says she descended into the dark world of QAnon’s discredited claims about child trafficking and the coronavirus and was pushed over the edge into the “manic-type episode” that’s received millions of views online.

“I went down a spiral that resulted in my very public implosion,” she told the Daily News in a phone interview Thursday.

“The whole reason I was staying at a hotel the night before the Target outburst was because my husband and I were fighting over QAnon. He was observing me getting sucked in," she said.

“You need to snap out of it. This is ridiculous. It’s taking over your life. You’re detaching from everyone and everything you love. We’re losing you," he husband pleaded with her, she recalled.

“There are children involved in this! You have to understand!” she told him before bolting, she said.

..........................

She’s now writing a book about the experience and want’s people to know there is a path back to stability.

The memoir, reported Wednesday by the Washington Post, is titled, “You Can’t Cancel Me — The Story of My Life." It’s due for publication in the Spring.

She said QAnon is so insidious because it has so many different hooks and makes use of online algorithms to target vulnerable people with relentless messaging.

“One of biggest ways I was getting echo-chambered was through Facebook groups,” she said.

“I was drawn in through the wellness and spiritual community, and slowly these very large groups got infiltrated. Before I knew it, my entire feed on Instagram and Facebook was filled with what I now recognize to be QAnon information, a lot of it skewed toward anti-vaccine material,” she said.

God, I used to see this HUGE Facebook Groups ad in Manhattan on my walking commute and in retrospect....

.....I know he's incapable of this level of self-reflection and ownership of his mistakes, but I do wonder if Zuckerberg realizes what he's wrought upon the world.

Felipe Neto: how a YouTuber became one of Jair Bolsonaro's loudest critics

The experience has made Neto an expert on the internet’s role in politics and daily life. “The algorithm is fed by us human beings,” he said. “The algorithm gives us back what we want.”

Facts, reality, science – all the dry subjects that human beings have based their understanding of the world on – are too dull for many people, he said.

Conspiracy theories, such as Flat Earth or QAnon, bring a deluded sense of belonging to those who follow them and are more entertaining, he said.

“It’s our hunger for conspiracy, our desire to hear and share lies. Because life is very boring when it’s only based on truth,” he said. “Humanity is heading for destruction if the algorithms are not regulated somehow.”

And Bolsonaro’s supporters “get stronger with lies, with radicalisation, and the use of algorithms to brainwash the population. If it wasn’t for this, Bolsonarism wouldn’t exist,” he said.

She’s now writing a book about the experience and want’s people to know there is a path back to stability.

The memoir, reported Wednesday by the Washington Post, is titled, “You Can’t Cancel Me — The Story of My Life." It’s due for publication in the Spring.

Oh, just f*ck you, bish. You should be permanently ashamed of how easily you got snookered, how you acted, and know to not try to make money off the fact you were a gullible f*cking idiot.

Also the New York Daily News needs to hire a gd copy editor.

OG_slinger wrote:
She’s now writing a book about the experience and want’s people to know there is a path back to stability.

The memoir, reported Wednesday by the Washington Post, is titled, “You Can’t Cancel Me — The Story of My Life." It’s due for publication in the Spring.

Oh, just f*ck you, bish. You should be permanently ashamed of how easily you got snookered, how you acted, and know to not try to make money off the fact you were a gullible f*cking idiot.

Her story may help with prevention and/or a cure to this particular weak link in the human condition. For a potentially significant number. If we think to those who could then reach others that are perhaps sheltered from anything or anyone contrary.

The undesirables can thrive on the rest of us distancing each other through derision, humiliation, and shame.

Different educational opportunities. Different comprehension levels. Varying mental spectrums. Varying emotional wavelengths. Trauma fragmentation. Religious indoctrination. Political echoes. There's a lot to be mindful of.

Anyway.

I couldn't access the provided website. I could the Washington Post and I believe it is worth a read.

She’s hoping to rehabilitate her own image, yes. This article, of course, is a part of that effort. But she also wants to help others who might find themselves in the same spiral.

As it has for so many, 2020 swallowed Lively in an “overwhelming tidal wave of loss and rage and grief and confusion.” It resurfaced trauma from her childhood in Denver that she had spent years hiding. She lost her mother at 14 to an overdose and her father eight years later, after he had a bicycle accident. But she never spoke about it, never went to therapy, never worked through it.

Meanwhile, work took a dark turn as covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, hit the economy. “These are big corporations I work with, having to lay off hundreds of people, and I have to look people in the eye and try to communicate that in PR jargon,” she said, adding, “It kind of sent me in a tailspin, searching for answers.”

She found those answers in QAnon, which she discovered through some of the natural wellness and spirituality spaces she inhabited online. She spent her nights, then her days, scrolling through them as her mind wandered further away from reality.

“I was living in a fantasy land in my mind,” she said. “But I take full accountability. I know I scared a lot of people. I know I angered a lot of people.”

That anger became evident when she came home from a week-long involuntary hospitalization to hundreds of furious emails and phone calls.

“My messages would fill up every single day with people saying, ‘I hope you die. Please kill yourself. I’m going to come and kill you. I know you have two little dogs, and I just put a spell on them to make them die tonight,’ ” she said. “The most horrible things you can possibly imagine. I received instructions with pictures: ‘Here’s how you should kill yourself.’ ”

Her husband, her husband’s business partners and even her hairstylist’s husband were getting threats. She was too ashamed to be seen in public.

Ashley Anderson said she wishes the public knew more about her friend. When the investment banker first moved to Phoenix and didn’t know anyone, her son with special needs got very sick. Anderson had only known Lively for a couple weeks but asked for her help. Lively made several phone calls to doctors to get Anderson’s son seen quickly. During his three-week hospital stay, she frequently visited him and brought him gifts, Anderson said. “I barely knew this person, and that is how she treated my family, which I will never forget.”

But the public didn’t see this side of Lively. And she felt alone.

“You obviously learn who your real friends are fast. I found out that I didn’t have very many,” Lively said through tears. “This is why this whole cancel culture is so scary. What happens when a human being gets canceled? They don’t want to exist anymore.”

After trying to repair her marriage and figure out the help she needed, she attended an eight-week trauma program at the Meadows, a rehabilitation facility in Wickenburg, Ariz. She swore off QAnon. She sent an apology letter to the employees of Target. She started a YouTube channel to discuss topics like mental health and conspiracy theories. Finally, in mid-August, a former client called to hire her, the first since the incident.

“I was in bed, like not able to move. I had no reason to get up. Every day was Groundhog’s Day, with nothing going on,” she said. But after the call, “I got out of bed, and I was like, ‘There’s one person who still believes in me. I’m going to get up and put my shoes on and get my briefcase and go back to work. You can cancel me all you want, but I will not cancel myself.’ ”

Soon thereafter, she received a call from Doc Elliot, who runs the California-based Phoenix Training Group, which conducts de-escalation training. He wanted to hire her, too. He wanted her to tell her own story.

“When I watched the video of Melissa, instantly my heart was breaking. I knew it wasn’t a typical incident where a so-called Karen goes off the rails,” said Elliot, a longtime mental health advocate. “And that fact that she was [later] owning that was, to me, brilliant.”

“Now, she has really taken on a different professional role, speaking about the mental health crisis we’re experiencing right now … rather than trying to sell a magazine or a company,” he said. “I really have to applaud her for that. She’s followed through on her message.”

Ron Watkins was going off on Parler tonight, admitting (among other things) that his father was one of the people posting as Q. This has been assumed for some time by Q critics but was little more than an educated guess until now.
Shortly afterward his account was deleted and he went on twitter saying he never had a parler account- despite the now-deleted account being verified, which requires you submit a valid government-issued ID.

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/9ZcBpH5/F86-D2013-87-DE-4-EC2-892-E-9-F30-B43-FC90-C.jpg)

I’m a little confused - I thought some other guy was recently outed as Q. Or is it a group affair as a lot of people have surmised?

It's assumed to be a group affair at this point, Jim Watkins and the people working with/for him.

This could go in any number of threads...

A former right-wing media creator on how a ‘different reality’ became so prominent.

NYT wrote:

Matthew Sheffield started his first conservative website in 2000, dedicating it to criticizing the former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who Mr. Sheffield believed was a partisan liberal and not critical enough of President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Mr. Sheffield then went on to help create NewsBusters, another right-leaning website that criticized the mainstream media for liberal bias. Later, he became the founding online managing editor of the Washington Examiner, another popular outlet for conservative views.

“I basically built the infrastructure for a lot of conservative online people and personally taught a lot of them what they know,” he said.

But Mr. Sheffield, who is 42 and lives in the Los Angeles area, grew disillusioned in recent years. He said facts were treated as an acceptable casualty in the broader political war. “The end justifies the means,” said Mr. Sheffield, who hosts a politics and technology podcast called Theory of Change and is writing a memoir about growing up in a strict Mormon family. He now blames right-wing media for undermining faith in American democracy by spreading unsubstantiated claims by President Trump and others that the election was rigged. Through websites and platforms like Facebook and YouTube, Mr. Sheffield said, right-wing media has created an environment in which a large portion of the population believes in a “different reality.”

In a recent interview, edited for length and clarity, Mr. Sheffield discussed how it got to this point.

What are some of the most important things about right-wing media that people don’t understand?

Almost all right-wing support in the United States comes from a view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals. This point is so important and so little understood. Logic doesn’t matter. Fact-checking doesn’t matter. What matters is if I can use this information to show that liberals are evil. Many of them are not interested in reporting the world as it is, but rather to shape the world like they want it to be.

A recent poll suggests about 70 percent of Republicans now believe the election was rigged. Can that be blamed on right-leaning media when President Trump is spreading misinformation about the results?

They go along with whatever he says. Before Trump won in 2016, conservative media was actually, finally, starting to develop a marginal sense of independence. But once he became the president all of that just fell apart. Now you can’t have a conservative outlet unless you worship Donald Trump. Your business will be destroyed. You can’t have a career in conservative media if you are against Donald Trump, with only a few exceptions.

Would this be possible without Facebook and social media platforms?

Facebook is the primary protector and enabler of the far right in the United States, without question. The company has sheltered and promoted this content for years. Mark Zuckerberg even now says that Steve Bannon calling for beheadings is not justification to ban him. Zuckerberg was also fine with tolerating Holocaust denial until he was called out for it.

Do you see a way out of this, or will the problem get worse?

The first step is to get people to improve their information diet. If you’re eating nothing but candy or toxic food you are going to get sick. If you can improve your news diet to include things that you like but also other things that might be challenging to you then you are going to have a much better understanding of life. In the information age, the people who control the information control the age. That is something that the right-wing media apparatus has figured out.

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that right wing media is the public enemy #1 in America and dismantling it is the only path forward especially after watching this snippet of OANN election coverage from today.

It is bitterly ironic that this guy's answer to his perception of liberal media bias was to create media outlets with conservative bias.

If only the FCC oversaw things outside of licensed broadcasters, and weren't rendered even more toothless by an administration which benefits from constantly griping about distorted/fake news yet benefits so much from the same that they dare not allow the FCC any power over it.

Facebook Knows That Adding Labels To Trump’s False Claims Does Little To Stop Their Spread

BuzzFeed News wrote:

The labels Facebook has been putting on false election posts from President Donald Trump have failed to slow their spread across the platform, according to internal data seen by BuzzFeed News.

In the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election, Trump has repeatedly spread false information questioning President-elect Joe Biden’s victory — and been rewarded with massive engagement on Facebook. The company has attempted to temper this by adding labels to the false claims directing people to accurate information about the election and its results.

But this has done little to prevent Trump’s false claims from going viral on Facebook, according to discussions on internal company discussion boards. After an employee asked last week whether Facebook has any data about the effectiveness of the labels, a data scientist revealed that the labels — referred to as “informs” internally — do very little to reduce them from being shared.

”We have evidence that applying these informs to posts decreases their reshares by ~8%,” the data scientists said. “However given that Trump has SO many shares on any given post, the decrease is not going to change shares by orders of magnitude.”

The data scientist noted that adding the labels was not expected to reduce the spread of false content. Instead, they are used “to provide factual information in context to the post.”

...

Twitter has been more aggressive in limiting the spread of misleading election information, and in some cases prevented Trump’s tweets from being liked or retweeted. Last week, the company said it had labeled about 300,000 tweets for misleading information about the election, while restricting more than 450 from being liked or retweeted.

“We saw an estimated 29% decrease in Quote Tweets of these labeled Tweets due in part to a prompt that warned people prior to sharing,” the company wrote in a blog post, referring to a practice in which a user shares a tweet while adding their own commentary on top.

...

The 8% decrease of shares due to an election label is worse than a similar effort by Facebook to add context to false content. In 2017, the company claimed that it reduced the spread of content by 80% once a fact-checker had labeled it false. Facebook labels but does not reduce the reach of false election content from politicians.

Facebook does not allow its fact-checking partners to evaluate the content from politicians like Trump and instead created a set of labels meant to refer people to credible election information, as opposed to issuing a direct fact-check.

The labels did little to deter Trump or slow the spread of his disinformation. On Sunday night and Monday morning, Trump twice posted, “I won the Election!” The two false posts attracted more than 1.7 million reactions, 350,000 comments, and 90,000 shares in total.

Those posts, along with another from Trump on Sunday that doubted the election outcome, accounted for the three most-engaged posts on all of Facebook in the past 24 hours, according to CrowdTangle, an analytics platform owned by Facebook.

Biden Won the Battle—but Dems Are Losing the Social Media War

Someone metioned this online, and it stuck with me:

Could we possibly be in a position where we "win" over the virus with a second lockdown and vaccine, but otherwise "lose" becase social media extremism has a solid 40% of the country come out of the lockdown a bunch of David Icke lunatics?

Prederick wrote:

Biden Won the Battle—but Dems Are Losing the Social Media War

Someone metioned this online, and it stuck with me:

Could we possibly be in a position where we "win" over the virus with a second lockdown and vaccine, but otherwise "lose" becase social media extremism has a solid 40% of the country come out of the lockdown a bunch of David Icke lunatics?

40% of the country just voted like they were already David Icke lunatics, so honestly, I don't see much of a difference between reality and your idea.

Not terribly relevant but while playing Civ VI with wife and friend this weekend I joked that once you research Social Media technology, it should start a 20 year doomsday timer.

Long, but explains a lot of our hellworld.

Prederick wrote:

Long, but explains a lot of our hellworld.

Great video. Nice twist in the middle that explains why the flat earth movement has been in decline recently.

Yeah, the twist is absolutely worth it (and also will make you want to jump out of a window).

I watched the "flat earth" video last night. I want to just go ahead and 'spoil' the 'twist' and talk about it.

.

.

.

Ready?

.

About a third of the way through he suggests that Flat Earth is losing momentum because they're all going to QAnon. First off, that's a great primer on QAnon. I hadn't known too much about it except that it's a stupid, mega-conspiracy. The basic info on what it is, what it looks like (which helps us recognize it in the wild, such as #savethechildren) was really helpful.

The basis is that 'real' flat earth is essentially evangelical and so is QAnon, but QAnon is far more encompassing, so its a natural next step after they realize how petty fighting over the shape of the Earth is.

It's a well made, well researched video and worth a watch if all the coy-ness about it being just a flat earth video turned you off.

Roiled by Election, Facebook Struggles to Balance Civility and Growth

New York Times wrote:

In the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with an alarming finding: Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site.

President Trump was already casting the election as rigged, and stories from right-wing media outlets with false and misleading claims about discarded ballots, miscounted votes and skewed tallies were among the most popular news stories on the platform.

In response, the employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls “news ecosystem quality” scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.

Typically, N.E.Q. scores play a minor role in determining what appears on users’ feeds. But several days after the election, Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to N.E.Q. scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently, said three people with knowledge of the decision, who were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

The change was part of the “break glass” plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election. It resulted in a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible, the employees said.

It was a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like. Some employees argued the change should become permanent, even if it was unclear how that might affect the amount of time people spent on Facebook. In an employee meeting the week after the election, workers asked whether the “nicer news feed” could stay, said two people who attended.

Guy Rosen, a Facebook executive who oversees the integrity division that is in charge of cleaning up the platform, said on a call with reporters last week that the changes were always meant to be temporary. “There has never been a plan to make these permanent,” he said. John Hegeman, who oversees the news feed, said in an interview that while Facebook might roll back these experiments, it would study and learn from them.

The news feed debate illustrates a central tension that some inside Facebook are feeling acutely these days: that the company’s aspirations of improving the world are often at odds with its desire for dominance.

...

Several employees said they were frustrated that to tackle thorny issues like misinformation, they often had to demonstrate that their proposed solutions wouldn’t anger powerful partisans or come at the expense of Facebook’s growth.

The trade-offs came into focus this month, when Facebook engineers and data scientists posted the results of a series of experiments called “P(Bad for the World).”

The company had surveyed users about whether certain posts they had seen were “good for the world” or “bad for the world.” They found that high-reach posts — posts seen by many users — were more likely to be considered “bad for the world,” a finding that some employees said alarmed them.

So the team trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict posts that users would consider “bad for the world” and demote them in news feeds. In early tests, the new algorithm successfully reduced the visibility of objectionable content. But it also lowered the number of times users opened Facebook, an internal metric known as “sessions” that executives monitor closely.

“The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” according to a summary of the results, which was posted to Facebook’s internal network and reviewed by The Times.

The team then ran a second experiment, tweaking the algorithm so that a larger set of “bad for the world” content would be demoted less strongly. While that left more objectionable posts in users’ feeds, it did not reduce their sessions or time spent.

That change was ultimately approved. But other features employees developed before the election never were.

One, called “correct the record,” would have retroactively notified users that they had shared false news and directed them to an independent fact-check. Facebook employees proposed expanding the product, which is currently used to notify people who have shared Covid-19 misinformation, to apply to other types of misinformation.

But that was vetoed by policy executives who feared it would disproportionately show notifications to people who shared false news from right-wing websites, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

Another product, an algorithm to classify and demote “hate bait” — posts that don’t strictly violate Facebook’s hate speech rules, but that provoke a flood of hateful comments — was limited to being used only on groups, rather than pages, after the policy team determined that it would primarily affect right-wing publishers if it were applied more broadly, said two people with knowledge of the conversations.

OG_slinger wrote:
New York Times wrote:

One, called “correct the record,” would have retroactively notified users that they had shared false news and directed them to an independent fact-check. Facebook employees proposed expanding the product, which is currently used to notify people who have shared Covid-19 misinformation, to apply to other types of misinformation.

But that was vetoed by policy executives who feared it would disproportionately show notifications to people who shared false news from right-wing websites, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

Another product, an algorithm to classify and demote “hate bait” — posts that don’t strictly violate Facebook’s hate speech rules, but that provoke a flood of hateful comments — was limited to being used only on groups, rather than pages, after the policy team determined that it would primarily affect right-wing publishers if it were applied more broadly, said two people with knowledge of the conversations.

"It's not fair to try to stop something terrible when only one side is doing it!"

YouTube temporarily suspends, demonetizes OANN

Axios wrote:

YouTube has barred One America News Network from posting new videos for a week and stripped it of its ability to make money off existing content after the Trump-friendly channel uploaded a video promoting a phony cure for COVID-19, YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi tells Axios.

Why it matters: YouTube has been criticized for allowing OANN to spread misinformation using its platform, particularly around coronavirus and the election. This marks the Google-owned service's first crackdown against OANN.

Details: OANN's one-week suspension from posting new videos or livestreams is the result of a "strike" YouTube issued for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits saying there is a guaranteed cure to the virus. YouTube took down the video that triggered the strike.

-- OANN is also suspended from the YouTube Partner Program, which means if it wants to monetize its videos again, it will have to re-apply.

-- YouTube has a three-strikes policy before an account is terminated. This is OANN's first strike, but it has violated the platform's COVID-19 misinformation policy before, meaning it gets no more warnings if it breaks the rules again — just additional strikes.

-- YouTube says it does not consider OANN an authoritative news source.

It feels like someone is misusing the word ‘disproportionately’. If the rule is “every time you curse, you get flicked”, and I curse 10 times to your once, I’m not getting disproportionately flicked. I’m getting precisely-the-right-portionately flicked.

Share a bunch of right wing nutter posts? Get told you shared nutter posts a lot. Don’t, don’t. That’s not disproportionality, that’s consequence.

Apparently Parler--the right-wing version of Twitter--got hacked.

First OANN and now Nazis? It's like early Christmas on social media.

OANN needs to be permanently banned but hopefully the indefinite demonetization curtails them a bit. Maybe they’ll overreact to it like Alex Jones did and ramp up their rhetoric enough to get permanently suspended. I’ve been keeping an eye on them and as bad as Fox News can be, OANN is practically a window into a parallel universe.

OG_slinger wrote:

Apparently Parler--the right-wing version of Twitter--got hacked.

First OANN and now Nazis? It's like early Christmas on social media.

I think it was only their Wordpress blog, and not Parker itself.

absurddoctor wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Apparently Parler--the right-wing version of Twitter--got hacked.

First OANN and now Nazis? It's like early Christmas on social media.

I think it was only their Wordpress blog, and not Parker itself.

Parker was hacked?

IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/3hPuZ_Q_mqNk14dHO8KxfWNLKPmjAN5Y3ln5oQst0pR7lEVrwqOoyY7hsLkhXKYR0b6txX5Dehrbf7kzsLzHGzA8PdtDfzCa4ieyP2aDOgTZbryMNo2XFBG4BF3dx3nHkw85xdQ)

absurddoctor wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Apparently Parler--the right-wing version of Twitter--got hacked.

First OANN and now Nazis? It's like early Christmas on social media.

I think it was only their Wordpress blog, and not Parker itself.

Appears not.