Facebook “Mistakenly” Censors Conservative Education Company For “Hate Speech Violations”
August 19, 2018 in News, Video by RBN Staff
source: www.zerohedge.com
by Tyler Durden
Facebook says it “mistakenly” removed several videos and censored the reach of conservative educational organization PragerU, short for Prager University.
On Friday, Prager tweeted evidence that they were being “heavily censored” by Facebook – writing “Our last 9 posts are reaching 0 of our 3 million followers. At least two videos were deleted last night for “hate speech” including our recent video with @conservmillen.
For reference, here’s one video deemed too “hateful” for Facebook – which suggests that when society tries to force men to feminize in order to eliminate “toxic masculinity,” it only creates a more toxic environment vs. encouraging men to harness their inherent masculinity for the sake of good.
Facebook responded 8 hours afte Prager University’s original tweet with an apology, writing in a tweet: “We mistakenly removed these videos and have restored them because they don’t break our standards. This will reverse any reduction in content distribution you’ve experienced. We’re very sorry and are continuing to look into what happened with your Page.”
PragerU produces short educational videos on a wide varierty of topics from a conservative perspective. While not typically covering current events, Prager provides counterpoints to many liberal talking points – including oppression of women, climate change, gun ownership and trust in the media. In 2017, Google restricted of demonitized 37 PragerU videos, which the university challenged in a lawsuit that was later dismissed by a district court judge.
Considering the recent high-profile ban of controversial conservative Alex Jones in a seemingly coordinated attack by YouTube, Facebook, Apple and several other social media companies and online services. After resisting calls to ban Jones, Twitter finally handed the Infowars host a week-long suspension for “abusive behavior.”
President Trump weighed in on the matter on Saturday, tweeting “Social media is totally discriminating against Republican/conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.”
Trump called censorship “a very dangerous thing.”
Trump went on to question “who is making the choices” regarding censorship, “because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”
On Saturday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted to CNN’s Brian Stelter that Twitter employees have “more left-leaning” bias, though he claims the San Francisco, CA company operates in a neutral manner.
“We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is…is more left-leaning,” said Dorsey.
Dorsey’s CNN appearance was the latest stop in Twitter’s rehabilitation road-show after evidence emerged that they had been “shadow banning” conservative users through a variety of methods; including hiding tweets from followers and hiding conservative users from search results.
And while Silicon Valley social media companies and their defenders may argue that “it’s a private platform, if you don’t like it, start your own Twitter,” – journalist Tim Pool points out the flaw in that logic:
Perhaps social media companies should, as President Trump says, “Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”