Facebook employees tried to censor Donald Trump posts
This is what happens when social justice warriors move from college to social media companies.
This should surprise no one.
These are probably the same people who in college demanded intellectual safe spaces and trigger warnings.
We have seen it at Twitter, where conservative accounts seem to be targeted, and also at Facebook, where there were allegations of the same.
The Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump’s Posts as Hate Speech:
Some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s posts on Facebook have set off an intense debate inside the social media company over the past year, with some employees arguing certain posts about banning Muslims from entering the U.S. should be removed for violating the site’s rules on hate speech, according to people familiar with the matter.
The decision to allow Mr. Trump’s posts went all the way to Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who ruled in December that it would be inappropriate to censor the candidate, according to the people familiar with the matter. That decision has prompted employees across the company to complain on Facebook’s internal messaging service and in person to Mr. Zuckerberg and other managers that it was bending the site’s rules for Mr. Trump, and some employees who work in a group charged with reviewing content on Facebook threatened to quit, the people said.
Keep in mind this is not an issue of a post calling for violence. This was a matter of considering the post offensive, as the Journal further reported:
Issues around Mr. Trump’s posts emerged when he posted on Facebook a link to a Dec. 7 campaign statement “on preventing Muslim immigration.” The statement called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Mr. Trump has since backed away from an outright ban based on religion, saying his policies would target immigrants from countries with a record of terrorism.
Users flagged the December content as hate speech, a move that triggered a review by Facebook’s community-operations team, with hundreds of employees in several offices world-wide. Some Facebook employees said in internal chat rooms that the post broke Facebook’s rules on hate speech as detailed in its internal guidelines, according to people familiar with the matter.
Content reviewers were asked by their managers not to remove the post, according to some of the people familiar. Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, later explained in an internal post that the company wouldn’t take down any of Mr. Trump’s posts because it strives to be impartial in the election season, according to people who saw the post.
There is a movement to purge Trump support not only from the pages of Facebook, but also to kick Peter Thiel off the Facebook Board because of his support for Trump, the Journal reported:
The internal debates shed light on how Facebook has grappled with its position as one of the biggest sources of political information during a particularly contentious election cycle.
This week, a controversy bubbled up around Facebook director Peter Thiel, who recently pledged $1.25 million to support Mr. Trump. In an internal post to employees confirmed by the company, Mr. Zuckerberg urged tolerance of Mr. Thiel’s political activity, saying it was key to cultivating diversity. Facebook declined to comment further on the matter, and Mr. Thiel didn’t respond to a request for comment.
We report regularly on the anti-free speech mania on campuses, in which minority political positions are driven off campus both physically (shout downs, disruptions) and intellectually (trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaced).
You laugh at it, but it’s not funny. That attitude increasingly is entrenched at social media giants because yesterday’s campus social justice warriors are today’s content review specialists.
Featured Image: Anti-Trump protester Chicago (language warning):
Entirety of modern leftist thought eloquently summed up in 20 seconds. pic.twitter.com/E3K5IRvA9M
— Tumblrisms (@Tumblrisms) March 19, 2016
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
No, actually, I don’t laugh at it. It frightens me to my core.
And, perhaps even more disturbing, is that it’s clear the indoctrination has been methodically occurring well BEFORE college – otherwise, this would not be so endemic on college campuses, among the professors, and with young people moving into the workforce.
Deeply disturbing. Horrifyingly frightening. Because free speech is the fundamental, the most elemental,the foundational requirement of a free society.
“is that it’s clear the indoctrination has been methodically occurring well BEFORE college ”
It starts in kindergarten.
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
Vladimir Lenin
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/v/vladimir_lenin.html
And they have absolutely no concept that it is wrong
No surprise, Professor Jacobson. These SJW’s remind of a statement if Saul Bellow’s.
“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
Unfortunately, such need can bring about a great deal of harm to oneself as well as others.
This is no accident. The progressive left has worked for at least a generation to “build” warriors from the ground up. Never mind higher education, look also as primary education. It’s just as bad.
The risk to companies is whether some of these employees…..I mean activists….will cost them in the end. Lawfare and the creation of laws are the tools of cultural change to progressives. Forcing change by the rule of law is more evident now than ever before. Some companies need to be very alert to that.
Suggested Ad: FaceFixedBook.com, where only neutered speech is allowed.
It’s been festering for a long time. The entire concept of “hate crimes” is aimed squarely at this sequence; “hate crimes” morphs into “hate” as a crime in itself, in turn deteriorating into “hate speech” as a crime. The final step is then obvious; any speech someone doesn’t like, or wants to see suppressed for any reason, is just defined as “hate” and therefore subject to suppression and censorship. The distilled essence of Political Correctness and the elimination of public dissent on any topic.
… A simple logical progression which has been bloody obvious right from the start.
And they wonder why we “cling bitterly” to our weapons?
Many of us have glibly opined something along the lines of: “Wait until they get out of college and get a taste of the real world.” But this is what is happening to that real world. Every company has positions that only require some sort of “soft” degree. As the SJWs move into HR, “continuous improvement” and other similar positions life will be fundamentally transformed.
They already work for the IRS
It used to be that the lower level jobs went overseas because of economics. Now higher skilled jobs are going overseas to avoid the SJWs coming our of higher education (there’s a joke) system. They go to a different country, but they go.
Fascism arises from the left
Let me use this moment to go the opposite way and promote free speech on the internet.
Namely a twitter alternative called Gab.ai ( http:/gab.ai ) a twitter alternative recently created with the motto “speak freely”. It was created after Milo ( slavic alphabet soup– sorry but I will butcher it even though I am slavic ) got banned by twitter.
Don’t like the censored sites. Just use the laternate sites.
Unfortunately, so many of these sites, like Facebook, are used by bloggers to their sign in protocols. Don’t use Facebook or Twitter you are SOL to comment on these sites. Instapundit is a prime example of this.
Instapundit uses Disqus; I think you’re confused with Hot Air.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE. Mark Steyn on a college president inventing the hate crime of racial facials:
Disciplined? For what? [Beverly Kopper, President of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater] blamed the students for ‘failing to think about the implications’ – of having a facial. Because we live in a world where a facial is one step away from a minstrel show.
–Via InstaPundit
I keep waiting for this whole thing to reach critical mass and fall in on itself.
Still waiting…
That is clearly a cat-lady in the video.
Twenty years from now, it will be her house in one of those news stories about 342 cats, some dead, rescued from a house full of filth and squalor.
Red Brigades. Ellen Pao seems to have beamed directly over from China’s Cultural Revolution. Anyone who disagrees with her makes her feel “unsafe” and “not included,” hence they must not be allowed to work or live. She directly threatens the lives of half the populace and SHE feels unsafe!
One of the things Ellen Pao does nowadays is run some group that works with venture capitalists to promote diversity.
Peter Theil also works for Y Combinator. a fairly big venture capitalist firm. Because of Theil’s support of Trump, Pao has cut off support for Y combinator.
Great way to promote diversity, though probably a good thing for the companies that Y combinator supports.
I believe I’ve mentioned this before.
Let me give some background though:
< background >
There is a program called git. It’s purpose is version control also known as source control. It serves two purposes. The first is to
prevent groups of programmers working together not to step on each others toes. The second is for programmers to catalog versions of the source code of a program. Imagine something similar for someone like Stephen King where different revisions of a book are saved and cataloged.
Certain pieces of software ( called open source ) such as Firefox, Chrome, Android make their code available to everyone. The present way to distribute the source code is to use git with a web site that stores “the repositories” of source code. The biggest being github.
Github, like many of these places, also allows, for a fee, companies to store their proprietary software using on Github in private repositories.
</ background>
About two years ago a wacko SJW by the name of Julie Ann Horvath tried to “reform” github. Failing badly, and getting pissed when other employees were cheering her departure, she made bogus claims of sexual harassment.
She shook things up enough so that some people had to leave and in their absence the site went full SJW.
BTW if you go to youtube ans watch her videos you discover why her co-employees cheered when she quit. She has a potty mouth that makes Trumps locker room talk look like high tea with the queen.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/25/github-hires-notorious-social-justice-warrior-to-work-on-anti-harassment/
http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2
Did the Mizzou professor who got fired dye her hair blond and get a new job?
I started to feel like a 1938 Jew shopping at an Nazi dollar store when using Amazon. I’ve cut my spending there to almost nill.
Conservatives need to shun FB, Twitter and all of those lib run companies. If AMZN can decide an orange 70’s Dodge Charger is hate speech, they can just as easily come after us in other ways.
Anyone else notice that those complaining of being offended and being afraid are usually the most offensive and most threatening people in sight? For example, the young woman in the photo – she’s probably complaining about something she found scary and offensive, and to do so she became loud and bellicose, violated someone else’s space, and likely made threats about what she might do if she doesn’t get her way.
I’m sure the irony and hypocrisy goes ppphhhhffftttt right over her head.
This is all part of the Devil Soros plan to take over our culture. Don’t send your kids to college just to be deep in debt and be fascists. Have them learn a trade and become a useful member of society instead.
Why does any conservative still use either facebook or twitter? Someone needs to create alternatives to each that will openly censor the left.
And anyone not voting Trump is condoning and encouraging this. Period.