16 Comments

I'm curious if there are some under-the-table agreements in place, so that these social media giants give favor to news media giants by subduing independent entities that might compete with them.

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Matt, can I offer myself up as a Censored person?

I’ve been chronicling my experiences of being maligned in my local paper and my efforts to get the story corrected... this eventually turned into an investigation on my part which found that my local paper is owned by a corporate conglomerate that owns 350+ publications and none of them appear to have a Correction Policy or a Code of Ethics.

Here’s my first story:

How My Local Paper Destroyed My Life and My Mental Health

https://link.medium.com/Jy6PZIYNxbb

...which led to my 2nd story:

An Up-Close Look At Journalistic Rot In Action: See a series of unbelievable emails with newspaper executives and what they reveal

https://link.medium.com/ZgDYLGaOxbb

...which led to my latest story in this saga:

Meet The “Sinclair Broadcast Group” of Local Newspapers: Lee Enterprises is one of the largest owners of local newspapers in America. Their apparent indifference to the truth, ethics, and transparency, is terrifying.

https://link.medium.com/mzOOT3dOxbb

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This will be the death of FB, Youtube and Twitter. I think we will soon see challengers to all those platforms that will build on two things.

1. The payment from the users to keep their information private from the advertisers and free from commercial.

2. The payments will be used to "patron" the content makers - in a bit, the same way that Spotify distribute funds to the music artist.

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I have nothing but respect for News2Share. It does live coverage of events, allows all sides to speak candidly about their POV, and doesn’t editorialize.

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My twitter account was shut down for a day because I tweeted "Kill the Filibuster!" They said I was harassing someone - apparently named Filibuster

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Fisher's content gets blocked and flagged, while "reputable" sources sail right through. That's a darkly efficient way to not only censor content, but funnel it through 'approved' gatekeepers. When I had a FB account, 'NowThis' was loved by my progressive friends, as it showed context free Woke Corp agitprop that was sure to get anti-Trump eyeballs.

He'd love a verification checkmark? Maybe that's the wrong approach. Asking the enemy for permission might not be as good a strategy as building ones own platform.

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The human reviewers are primarily located outside of the US, so even if they didn’t need to work at such a rapid pace that makes paying attention to the details of the content practically impossible, they don’t/can’t understand the nuances of our politics. In practice, they aren't much better than faceless algorithms.

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The content moderation and moderators are examined in the extraordinary film "The Cleaners".

The film is both fascinating and disturbing.

"Enter a hidden third world shadow industry of digital cleaning, where the Internet rids itself of what it doesn't like. Here we meet five “digital scavengers”, among thousands of people outsourced from Silicon Valley, whose job is to delete “inappropriate” content of the net. In a parallel struggle, we meet people around the globe whose lives are dramatically affected by online censorship. A typical “cleaner” must observe and rate thousands of often deeply disturbing images and videos every day, leading to lasting psychological impacts.

Yet underneath their work lie profound questions around what makes an image art or propaganda and what defines journalism. Where exactly is the point of balance for social media to be neither an unlegislated space nor a forum rife with censorship? "

Here is a clip from the CBC interview with the filmmakers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwbwxStnI3M

IMDB link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7689936/

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