30 ms·
Meta Censoring '#Democrat' on Instagram
- vool 2y agoThis is the Freedom you voted for !
- ajoseps 2y agoyeah i’m also seeing this. It might be a bug but highly suspicious
- binarymax 2y agoDon’t support meta. Don’t use their products. This has been obvious for so long. Just delete your accounts and move elsewhere.
- jmye 2y agoYup. Anyone who still maintains an account on any Meta product (including WhatsApp) is giving this shit their full-throated support in the only way Zuck cares about. And that says nothing about the kinds of horrible people still working there.
- NotGMan 2y ago[flagged]
- piva00 2y ago"What about?"
- inglor_cz 2y agoThe thing is, "deplatforming" is always popular with people as long as the thoughts unpopular among those people are being deplatformed. But once the mechanism for systemic deplatforming has been built, it can be captured by other groups. I suspect that after 15-20 years of the pendulum swinging to a fro, the "freeze peach" crowd may reconsider the value of, again, systemic tolerance.
- piva00 2y agoThe whole "deplatforming" has always been a stupid whack-a-mole. The core issue is the media itself, social media as it is will always tend to make bullshit spread fast and wild because that's the entire nature of bullshit. It's broken in its core, I don't see any way to patch what social media has developed into. Reactionary ideas are more viral, hatred is more viral, the metric is always "engagement" and there's no primal drive in humans to be more engaged with boring stuff like truthful, nuanced, and commeasured discussion rather than ragebait (on both sides). It feels to me we actually devolved to a world where norms, morals, etc. are defined by amoral virtual entities feeding people with content to make them engage more with the virtual entities... It's fucking dark and absurd the deeper I think about it, we're already being controlled by the machines we created.
- mardifoufs 2y agoYes, precedent is actually important. Using "whataboutism" because it's a trendy buzzword doesn't make precedent any less important.
- piva00 2y agoIt's not a buzzword, using the precedent to actually expose how it applies is valid, using whataboutism to deflect from the main point as a red herring is just a fallacy. It creates the false equivalence that because there was censorship against actual harmful speech then it's valid to censor a neutral term like "Democrats", without ever trying to differentiate how the level and degree of what was censored before is quite different from this instance. If you don't see that I'm quite disappointed, whataboutism is a deflection, it's a "you too" argument which is rather pathetic.
- argsnd 2y ago#fuckbiden works, #fucktrump gets censored. They better have a good explanation for why this is a bug.
- zero0529 2y agoI get results on #fucktrump. Don’t know what you’re talking about. (In EU, however #democrat is censored)
- tmountain 2y agoThey don't need explanations. America signed up for this. Now, everyone is just along for the ride.
- osmsucks 2y ago"Everyone" worldwide? The rest of the world didn't sign up for this.
- baq 2y agoIn a way they did. Europe outsourced their defense to the US, energy to Russia and manufacturing to China, now getting <censored> by all three, rather predictably.
- glimmung 2y agoWe also outsourced our social media. That has to change - it's literally not safe. There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point. For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.
- Wickedflickr 2y agoI truly believe the Fediverse is a viable solution. I've found Lemmy to be an extremely viable alternative to Reddit. The fediverse, more than any other centralized solution, seems equipped to avoid the hellish pitfalls that profit-motive behemoths seemingly must sink into. There is no monetization, corporate decisions, manipulative algorithms; just self-hosted open source instances as far as the eye can see. Certainly there are rough edges and a perceptible decrease in dopamine from using them, but surely that's worth toughing out as they shape up if it means stopping the unfathomable destruction of society that we're experiencing in real time from big tech? In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes a powerful argument that independent, citizen owned media is of critical importance if we're to pull society to a better, more collaborative place. It doesn't get more 'citizen owned' than a web of interconnected self-hosted servers.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoSeems like several platforms are complying with fascists, so we should definitely be switching to decentralised platforms to communicate safely.
- Rodeoclash 2y agoYou cannot tech your way out of this.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoNo, but it seems like we'll need ways to co-ordinate resistance against the oppressors.
- zesterer 2y agoDecentralisation is a socio-political solution, not a technical solution. It directly addresses the problem of media ownership and proliferation.
- janice1999 2y agoIt's a limited solution at best. You can't win a tech arms race with the very people who control the core infrastructure, write the laws and run the police. Just ask the pro-Democracy protestors in Hong Kong.
- Jgoure 2y agoYou are so right!!!! Everyone is like Elon is the richest man! Bezos is the richest! The richest government scares the NSA, not these poor rich people.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoThat wasn't a tech arms race, that was military & police domination. We have a heavily contested information space, & so far we are still not an authoritarian state. It seems defeatist I'm extremely to say it's not worth trying to build a better less manipulable less privately controlled information space. It seems obvious that there's still time & patriotic as hell - fully committed to democracy & people, over large institutions & powers.
- Hamuko 2y agoWhat does "don’t CW this" mean?
- pjc50 2y agoPresumably "apply a content warning label"?
- Retr0id 2y agoWhich is a strange thing to write on Mastodon, which afaik doesn't let anyone except the author label their own posts.
- davidt84 2y agoWhich is why people will frequently repost things wrapped in a CW. Hence the request not to do that, so people see it.
- Retr0id 2y agoBut why make the request to yourself?
- davidt84 2y agoEh? It's a request to anyone reposting it.
- Retr0id 2y agoEven a repost can't edit/add a CW (which is why adding a CW to your post, counter-intuitively, will often net your post more visibility, since many feel uncomfortable reposting un-CW'd posts)
- davidt84 2y agoNo, you're talking about boosting (equivalent to retweeting). As you say, you can't add a CW doing that. So, people re-post manually (the content of the post, and/or a link to the post) with a CW. The request is not to do that.
- pjc50 2y agoWell I suppose that was inevitable. You don't have to have state-controlled media when you have a media-controlled state; Meta are simply protecting the investment which got Zuckerberg a seat near Trump at the inauguration.
- mjbale116 2y ago- "It violates freedom of speech!" - "This is a free market; if you do not like it use another platform!" - "I thought $conglomerate" had our back! They had rainbows and all; is that all it took them to fold"? - "No, this is not a systemic issue; conversation needs to be steered away from attacking the system and rather its a few bad apples! Go after them and stop asking for systemic changes!" - "Any attempt at regulating companies in an assault on #freedom and must not be tolerated"
- ffsm8 2y agoI am against almost all kinds of censorship, the only times I personally believe things should be censored if it's inciting violence/death threats to people. And even then I feel like censorship is probably the wrong way to do it. And from that perspective, these quotes you're currently touting are ripped out of their context, making them sound asinine despite being mostly on point, fundamentally. Twitter, Facebook, Google etc are private companies. They should be free to censor whatever they decide to censor. I would personally hate it if they did, and it'd hope we'd get a competing platform that doesn't censor and that that'd become the standard, but it is what it is. If a government makes the company censor something, then that is a violation of free speech (which I sadly don't have, as I'm not from the USA). And isn't that what happened in the context of Corona/antivax?
- vladms 2y agoWhat is censorship for you personally? I don't have a clear definition in mind (because I think is hard), but something along the lines of "the ones with overwhelming power should not be able to impose what ideas are spread". Why I think is hard it's because multiple rules can be made to make it impossible to spread ideas: talking loudly in the street => you disturb the neighbors; you send mails with pamphlets => it's spam; want to make an add on TV => extremely expensive. And so on.
- ffsm8 2y agoI completely agree that it's a very hard topic from the perspective of actually maintaining a healthy social media site. Most of them have a vision for their platform, i.e. town hall for Twitter, family and friend conversations for Facebook etc. To adhere to this image they filter out spam etc. now, filtering out obnoxious content just becomes one more rule and thus the slippery slope begins. But to answer your question: for me, any kind of interference such as deleting/hiding content or algorithmically influence which content is shown is censorship on social media platforms, and the user should be responsible for applying such censorship. I.e. provide a UI which let the user configure their own preferences. But actually nailing such a feature with a good UX ain't easy, and how to actually implement it isn't either, so that's just a pipedream, realistically speaking.
- octacat 2y agoMeta is switching shoes faster than it is stealing features from tiktok.
- postepowanieadm 2y agoHow the turntables.
- NeutralForest 2y agoI'm in Europe and I also have the democrat hashtag hidden but not the republican one. Between this and Musk salutes, it's very concerning.
- lta 2y agoThat's an understatement. I'm personally shit scared
- Aeolun 2y agoThis is not concerning. This is the expected end result of a man like that being re-elected after all he did.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoMeta is obviously segregating has tags based on politics behind the scenes, the question is why?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoThat's not Meta censoring, they just switched from autocratic to democratic (based on user votes) moderation. So enough bots voted to ban that hashtag.
- jampekka 2y agoGood that China has caught up US in tech, so at least us Europeans can escape the US oligarchical censorship. Not looking great for those left behind the great firewall of Muskerberg. When will PG fall in line?
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoMy concern about PG isn't that he's "falling in line" so much as ripping the mask off and embracing right-wing authoritarianism: So what do we do now? Wokeness is already in retreat. Obviously we should help it along. What's the best way to do that? And more importantly, how do we avoid a third outbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came back worse than ever. In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak of political correctness, but the next thing like it? The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder. Here we're up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up. https://paulgraham.com/woke.html https://paulgraham.com/woke.html (this entire essay is pathetically ignorant even by PG's standards, but the latent fascism is still very scary)
- Terretta 2y ago>> Is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak of political correctness, but the next thing like it? Of course there is. Remove dissent from media, discomfort from libraries, and debate from schools.
- pantalaimon 2y ago> When will PG fall in line? This post is already flagged
- t909 2y ago
- mohsen1 2y agoIt seems like they quickly resolved it but as people making software we know exactly what happened. The deployment was not successful. Does not make the idea any less ugly. I’m sure they are gonna redeploy a less obvious version
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agoSplit test started, AI detects outrage level. Data point taken. Roll-back initiated. All in one python script.
- internet_points 2y agoSo remember to tag all your political posts #republican from now on.
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agoThat'd be the ultimate dog whistle
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoThis being flagged is interesting in itself.
- AnonHP 2y agoI understand that this post is flagged because it can start flame wars and “not curious conversations”, but I’m curious about what people here from different parts of the world are seeing for these search terms. If censorship is indeed happening either due to manual flags or “AI” algorithms, people need to know what’s happening and if this is just anecdotal or geography specific or could be spreading to other countries in other forms for other search words and terms. I don’t have an Instagram account to verify this myself.
- pedrogpimenta 2y agoI get the same "We've hidden these results" on Instagram in Spain. But #democrats (plural) works and #fucktrump as well (a user here was saying that was censored but #fuckbiden was allowed)
- louismerlin 2y agoSame here in Germany
- monsieurgaufre 2y agoSame in Canada
- ryu2k2 2y agoI only have an X account and got no censorship for #fucktrump
- theclansman 2y agoThe whole Zuckerberg pretending to be conservative now that Trump is in power has been hilarious really. Like being in the Joe Rogan show, saying companies need more masculinity or some shit. How about we don't let private companies do whatever the fuck they want?
- aussieguy1234 2y agoLast time I checked, I had not moved to China. So why is my internet being censored?
- timbit42 2y agoCapitalism can be just as fascist and authoritarian as communism. Capitalism and communism are economic ideologies. Fascism and authoritarianism are political systems.
- Biplityboppity 2y agoWhen the mass deportations start and people are being disappointed into camps, you will not see the video evidence of it go viral.
- waltercool 2y ago[flagged]
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoSo Instagram definitely created two segregated lists of hashtags based on politics, and intentionally implemented SOMETHING in the algorithm differently between the two, messed up and revealed that they are trying to do SOMETHING differently between the two. Now that the tags are 'restored' the question is what is Insta actually trying to accomplish behind the scenes?
- slowmovintarget 2y agoThis sounds like Zuck didn't understand the whole push-back on censorship from Big Tech. It wasn't about censoring "the other folk" it's about not censoring. Allow discourse and stop putting your finger on the scale, dammit.
- silexia 2y agoZuckerberg came out and explicitly said the far left Biden administration censored Facebook directly. That is the real concern, not random silly SEO'd results that will be fixed quickly.