The Censorship has begun
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Just testing the new Great American Firewall!
Just tried it. It works fine. Granted, most results are from fascist accounts, but it does work
I wonder if that may be the cause of the block in the original post — i.e. if the fascist accounts were posting lots of “sensitive” content (such as stuff that would, in a different era, been far more likely to be removed if reported), then it might appear like the censorship that OP saw. I vaguely recall an instance of something similar happening, and if so, the “censorship” would be an automated error, and it being visible now would be after the manual intervention.
Occam’s razor disproves this to me.
It’s more likely that meta was testing censorship, but people caught on.
Than #johnOliver #bernieSanders #Democrat #proChoice etc. All being banned, but none of the conserve hashtags
Maybe this will hopefully get people to stop using the garbage platform that enabled Trump and aided a literal genocide because they didn’t hire anyone fluent in the language of the people being exterminated.
I can’t wait for the day Zuckerberg loses all his money and dies alone because he alienated himself from anyone who cared about him.
What was that story warning people that if they use RedNote they’ll experience ‘Chinese style censorship’ for the first time?
US using the old if you can’t beat em approach
Yeah the US is making China look tame… Fucked up world we live in… Definitely the wrong timeline…
What’s a two party state that’s one party down?
Simple democracy.
Sounds a bit like a…dictatorship
The Product Manager made the mistake of having the keyword be overtly banned by the SWEs.
What was intended was an algorithmic change to hide the content entirely and divert to “acceptable” topics while obfuscating the ban.
It will be corrected shortly.
Meta says its working urgently to fix a problem with Instagram which results in a “results hidden” message when users search for the terms “Democrat” or “Democrats”.
If that’s hard to fix, I recommend shutting down the servers forever.
Makes me wonder if it was something like a lot of people were scrolling those hashtags and leaving hate comments and it triggered some automated hide feature and now they’re trying to find some middle ground. That’s being very generous to Meta though.
I hope you’re right but something tells me this was intentional
I’m sure it happened just after Trump took office with explicit technocratic goals ENTIRELY on accident.
*technofascist
All I can think about is how Israel’s AI targeting program (lavender) is coming to a leftist near you. Combine with ukraines AI drones and we have a technofascist future where dissent gets removed permanently. Instead of banning your account they’ll be banning your life.
They’ve always been the same thing. If you took the concept of a technocracy at its most idealized form it’s still innately undemocratic.
It might, possibly, work, but it’s still authoritarian in nature.
But technofascist does strip their veneer of being actual engineers away I suppose, so it definitely has benefits.
It’s hard emotionally
Confirming this was the last straw and the moment I uninstalled all meta apps
Zuckerburg is furious that dems dragged him before congress and tried to blame Trump winning on Facebook.
Blocking hashtags while pretending to be more free speech.
I hope meta goes down in flames
I’m not sure how many years of headlines you all need before you just stop using these services. You already know they artificially lower your engagement, so you’re just literally wasting your time at this point. (If you’re not a fascist, that is.)
Preaching to the choir here
Running Shortlist includes blocking hashtags for:
democrat (but not republican)
voteblue (but not votered)
presidentbiden (but not president harris)
kamala
liberal
liberals
leftist
leftists
barackobama (but not presidentobama)
obama (but not obamas)
berniesanders
votebiden (votekamala, votetrump works tho)
democracy (WOW)
presidentcarter
fuckputin
makeamericasmartagain
libertarian (for some reason)
igcensorship
factsoverfiction
fuckdemocrats
fuckrepublicans
bluewave (redwave still works, shocker)
politicalleft (blocked, but politicalright isn’t)
fascism
fascist
antifascism
prochoice
Well fuck.
presidentbiden (but not president harris)
barackobama (but not presidentobama)
votebiden (votekamala, votetrump works tho)
presidentcarter
libertarian (for some reason)
These are some odd censorship choices. In America, libertarian is short for (not really anarcho) anarcho-capitalist and they tend to vote right wing. They’re the tea party essentially and trumps election is a culmination of the tea party’s power. I consider myself a left libertarian / anarcho-communist but we are not that common in America. Unfortunately.
And why censor Carter? He’s dead. And why biden but not Harris? So odd.
igcensorship
This one’s funny. I wonder if they’ll go recursive and add “igcensorshipcensorship” next.
From Germany: about half of these still work for me. But only half.
Some have started working for me again, #democrat works again, but not #prochoice #kamala or #fuckputin
Me too, I tried just a few. On pc #antifascist , #fascist and #democracy didn’t work. On a mobile phone from my colleague #democracy worked though.
German news magazine Der Spiegel wrote they had talked to a Meta representative and they said “This is definitely an error and we will fix it fast”
My personal take: An incident like this illustrates how vulnerable we are to being censored and silenced when using social media and communication channels owned by billionaires. It’s time not only to leave those platforms but to educate your friends and family why this is absolutely necessary. No more excuses.
Original: Update, 13.30 Uhr: Auf SPIEGEL-Anfrage hat sich Meta inzwischen kurz und knapp zu dem Phänomen geäußert. »Dies ist eindeutig ein Fehler, den wir schnell beheben werden«, so eine Sprecherin des Konzerns.
This has happened dozens of times, each time it was an “error”. Press X to doubt.
I know as a software engineer I frequently accidentally release bugs that block entire political parties after their opponents take power. It’s one of those things most people forget to write unit tests for.
Yes, and automatically follow JD Vance and Trump. Totally a bug /s
Could’ve happened to anybody, really.
Silly Copilot. My bad folks, it’s this crazy AI.
No no, the bug is it told you it hid results instead of just secretly hiding them. Hiding them was the intended behavior.
At the moment a search for #democrat on my facebook page returns a bunch of posts saying that searches for #democrat are blocked and a bunch (more recent ones) saying it isn’t.
I was skeptical that this was an outrage campaign but with a real news source having a quote verifying the behavior from the company (the above referenced article was on the Der Spiegel front page and the update is at the bottom.) I’m less skeptical.
Pushing through a change doesn’t happen by accidentally clicking on a button. Where I work it’s a multistep process requiring manager approval. Even if the block happened by mistake it still means there was a mechanism in place to make it happen, configured so that it only censored left leaning hashtags. This is “not good.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an AI or other automated system blocking it, because an outright block instead of a shadow ban seems unlikely to have been done by human hands. But that just indicates that there are systemic issues or biases that clearly favor one party over the other, and that’s not much better.
They will now shadow ban these topics, so people can catch them red handed. But users will just never see it in their feed
Yeah, that was my thought too. What a dumb way to censor by search input instead of censoring the output.
It probably went like this at Meta:
Product Manager: Hey we just got this word filter list from HQ to be implemented ASAP.
Devs: Sure thing boss.
That’s the mistake: putting it in the open ban list instead of the shadow ban list.
Dev acting in #resistance or dev making an honest mistake? I suppose we’ll never know.
hopefully resistance.
they said “This is definitely an error and we will fix it fast”
I’m pretty sure that’s literally what they always say.
Like, has a mainstream brainwashing platform ever admitted to making the change and owning up to it? As far as I can remember, these features keep accidentally getting thought up, coded and released into the production product.
I’m at the point where there is no benefit of the doubt, especially with malicious actors like Twitter and Facebook. If there isn’t proof they didn’t intend to release it (and you can’t exactly prove a negative), it was on purpose.
It’s not censorship. It’s a private company that is regulating the content on its platform. Nothing is stopping you from using a different one or creating your own
This is such a dumb thing to say, you could also say that all news papers etc. Are private companies.
But if they’re collectively controlled by a few people or the government, and only publish certain things. That is 100% censorship
As long as you don’t mind the fact that everyone else is on this particular one.
The network effect is a real thing, it’s not that simple.
