Tag: FACEBOOK

Facebook, Google Pour Big Money into Lobbying Congress While Blacklisting Conservatives

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By Sean Moran

Facebook and Google increasingly influence Congress as the social media giants censor conservative and alternative voices, dominate the Internet, and violate Americans’ privacy.

Facebook announced on Thursday that they have banned several conservative personalities such as Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor and YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson, journalist and activist Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulus. The social media giant also banned Louis Farrakhan from its platforms.

Facebook said that they banned these personalities because they were “dangerous.”

Amid calls for greater regulation of social media companies’ potential anticompetitive behavior, censorship of conservative and alternative voices, and privacy violations, Facebook and Google have remained at the top of Open Secret’s database of top spenders lobbying Congress.

So far in 2019, Facebook spent $3,400,000 and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, $3,530,00 in lobbying Congress. Alphabet also ranked as the eighth total highest spender in lobbying in 2018, spending $21,740,000, while Facebook spent $12,620,000.

Facebook’s influence has continued to rise over the years. In the early years of President Barack Obama, Facebook spent below one million dollars in 2008 and 2009. From 2011 to 2018, Facebook’s lobbying spending skyrocketed and reached historic highs in 2018, when they spent $12.6 million.

In 2019, Facebook lobbied heavily on H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, a Democrat bill which would restore the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality regulations, which arose as the result of Google’s heavy lobbying of the Obama administration. In 2019, Google also lobbied on the Save the Internet Act.

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In 2018, one of Facebook’s bills on which they lobbied Congress was H.R. 2520, the Browser Act, sponsored by then Rep. and now Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), which would require social media companies such as Facebook and Google to obtain explicit permission from users for collecting their private data. The Browser Act would also stipulate that these social media companies cannot deny services to users who do not opt-in to these companies’ collection of their private data. In 2017, the Browser Act was the most important issue on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Blackburn said that her legislation would establish one set of rules that would balance the relationship between ISPs and Facebook and Google. The legislation would also prevent the social media giants from unfairly profiting off of Americans’ private data without their explicit consent.

“We need one set of rules for the entire internet ecosystem with the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] as the cop on the beat,” said Senator Blackburn. “The FTC has the flexibility to keep up with changes in technology and its principal mission is consumer protection. The BROWSER Act will enable consumers to make more educated decisions regarding the nature of their relationship with tech companies.”

In contrast, Alphabet’s most prominent issues in Congress in 2019 and 2018 related to labor and antitrust, as well as telecommunications and technology.

Facebook and Google’s dominance on the Internet has become increasingly apparent as Google has approximately 90 percent of web search traffic, whereas in digital advertising, Google and Facebook amount to nearly two-thirds of American digital ad spending, with Amazon at a “distant third” at under nine percent.

In 2018, Google lobbied Congress fourteen separate times on multiple pieces of legislation that would have increased liability for companies that enabled sex trafficking.

Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress extends to its trade group, the Internet Association. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Internet Association spent $840,000. In total, the social media giants spent $2.6 million in 2018 for lobbying. In 2019, the association has spent $690,000 so far. Over the last two years, the Internet Association has focused on the Save the Internet Act as well as on legislation that would increase edge providers’ liability for hosting content that enables sex trafficking.

Facebook and Google influence political elections as well. During the 2018 election cycle, Alphabet donated:

  1. $223,269 to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s (D-TX) Senate campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a prominent critic of Silicon Valley censorship.

  2. $149,741 to Rep. Jacky Rosen’s Senate campaign (D-NV) to unseat Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV).

  3. $135,625 to Rep. Josh Harder’s congressional campaign.

  4. $124,508 to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s unsuccessful re-election campaign.

  5. $97, 364 to former Sen. Claire McCaskill’s failed re-election campaign.

During the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook donated:

  1. $75,005 to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign.

  2. $37,954 to Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) 2017 special Senate election against former Alabama judge Roy Moore.

  3. $34,534 to Heitkamp’s Senate election.

  4. $31,326 to McCaskill’s Senate campaign.

  5. $29,387 to Rosen’s successful campaign to unseat Heller.

As Facebook and Google and other social media giants continue to increasingly censor and blacklist conservative and alternative voices, more and more conservative voices have called for addressing the social media giants’ dominance of the Internet. Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress also relates to political confrontations; during a hearing in December 2018, the then-ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee delivered a sharp rebuke of Republican accusations of Google’s political bias affecting its search engines, even though Google was his top donor.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said  he envisions three potential remedies for big tech’s violation of free speech and dominance on the Internet.

Cruz’s three solutions include:

  1. Amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
  2. Antitrust measures to address big tech’s dominant status on the Internet.
  3. Addressing potential cases of fraud and deception.

“No one wants to see the federal government regulating what is allowed to be said, but there are at least three potential remedies that can be considered by Congress or the administration or both,” Cruz said.

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JAMES WOODS BANNED FROM TWITTER AMID SILICON VALLEY’S CONSERVATIVE BLACKLISTING CAMPAIGN

James Woods Banned from Twitter Amid Silicon Valley’s Conservative Blacklisting Campaign

Twitter suspended Woods for a tweet that read, “‘If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll.”

By Justin Caruso

James Woods, one of the few conservative stars in Hollywood, has been locked out of his Twitter account for over a week now for “abusive behavior,” once again demonstrating the double standard the tech giant holds when it comes to enforcing rules.

Twitter suspended Woods for a tweet that read, “‘If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll,” according to his girlfriend Sara Miller.

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The tweet was apparently in reference to the Mueller report, which found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson and has been used in various forms in movies and TV shows like The Wire.

Nevertheless, this post apparently met the threshold on Twitter for “abusive behavior.”

Twitter does not appear to have the same standard for leftists. As Breitbart News has reported, there are several examples of actual violent threats going unchecked by the social media company.

  • Twitter allowed a number of verified accounts to participate in doxxing and violent threats against teenagers from Covington Catholic high school in January.
  • Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was on the receiving end of vicious sexist Twitter abuse after she defended Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
  • Actor Peter Fonda said that Barron Trump should be taken away from his Melania and put in a cage with pedophiles. Fonda also called for Kirstjen Nielsen to be whipped. He later apologized.
  • Hollywood star Jim Carrey posted a drawing of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. getting bludgeoned to death by an elephant last year. The tweet is still up.
  • In 2016, various accounts called for and cheered on the shooting of police officers.

Woods has been locked out of his account before for posting a meme.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has previously claimed that while he is “more left-leaning,” his company does not target users over political views.

“I think the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? We are not. Period. We do not look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology. We look at behavior,” he said last year.

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Snoop Dogg Encourages Everyone to Post Louis Farrakhan Footage on Facebook and Instagram

Credit: Daniel Boczarski / Stringer Editorial #: 467066492 Collection: Getty Images Entertainment Date created: March 20, 2015

By Jerome Hudson

Rapper and game show host Snoop Dogg took to Instagram late Thursday and urged his 31 million followers to post and share videos of Louis Farrakhan to Facebook and Instagram. The antisemitic Nation of Islam leader was banned from both platforms for what the social media giant said was Farrahkahn’s decision to “promote or engage in violence and hate.”

“If you’re down with it like I’m down with it, post your favorite Mr. Farrakhan videos on your Instagram and Facebook page,” Snoop Dogg said in an Instagram video posted Thursday. “Show some love to a real brother.”

***Graphic Langauge***

Breitbart TV

View this post on Instagram

P. S. A. 👊🏿🎥

A post shared by snoopdogg (@snoopdogg) on

“How the fuck y’all gonna ban Minister Louis Farrakhan for putting the truth out there?” Snoop asked in a separate video. “I stand with him. I’m with him. Ban me, motherfucker.”

Snoop Dogg encouraging his followers to post videos of Farrakahn on Facebook and Instagram appears to be in clear violation of the platform’s rules, which do not allow the promotion of “hate speech […] because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence.”

As recently as October Farrakhan posted a video to Twitter in which he called Jews “termites.” Twitter removed Farrakhan’s “verified” blue checkmark for hate speech.

Facebook and Instagram’s purge of conservative personalities also included Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor Paul Joseph Watson, and journalist and activist Laura Loomer.

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POYNTER ‘BLACKLIST’ OF CONSERVATIVE NEWS SITES WAS CREATED BY SPLC EMPLOYEE

Poynter ‘Blacklist’ of Conservative News Sites Was Created by SPLC Employee

List contains sites such as Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Breitbart

By Joe Schoffstall

A journalism institute released a “blacklist” of media outlets they deemed as “unreliable” that was created by an employee of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center and overwhelmingly contains conservative new media outlets.

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a Florida-based nonprofit journalism school, released the list on Wednesday and declared dozens of mainstream conservative sites such as the Washington Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Daily Signal, CNS News, and Breitbart as “unreliable” while listing few liberal sites,” Newsbusters reports. 

The study notes it trimmed the list “by removing several sites whose stories, though highly politicized, were mostly not fake: alternet.org, cato.org, heritage.org, nationalreview.com, thedailybeast.com, the intercept.com, thinkprogress.org, and weeklystandard.com.”

A majority of the removed sites lean left. Of the removed conservative sites, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank – and not in itself a news site — was taken off the list. However, the Daily Signal, which is hosted by the Heritage Foundation, is included on the list. Another conservative site that was removed from the list, the Weekly Standard, was shuttered in December.

While most of the sites are labeled as “unreliable”, “fake”, or “conspiracy” – or a combination of the three — the Free Beacon is listed as “bias”, a label that prompted further review of the sites that were ultimately removed from the list upon further review and before its release.

Barrett Golding, an employee at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left nonprofit embroiled in controversy over accusations of internal racism from its top management that led to its co-founder, Morris Dees, and president, Richard Cohen, being ousted from the group, created the list for Poynter.

Golding appears to have followed the SPLC “list” model in its creation of “unreliable” news sites, as many of the mainstream conservative sites on the list are thrown in with actual sites that push conspiracy theories. This mirrors the SPLC’s “hate group” list, which contains mainstream conservative organizations alongside racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC’s “hate” list, which it is perhaps best known for today, has helped the controversial — and allegedly internally racist group itself towards its black employees – to garner more than $500 million in total assets, $120 million of which is parked overseas.

“These sites stood next to conservative organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented baker Jack Phillips in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission,” Newsbusters writes. “While the ADF is not a news site, it was likely targeted because Golding works for the SPLC. The ADF is considered a ‘hate group’ by the SPLC and is marked on the ‘hate map.’ The Washington Post even questioned SPLC’s ‘political activism’ and ‘bias.'”

“SPLC has been dropped by Twitter from its Trust and Safety Council and slammed by the mainstream media after multiple scandals rocked the organization. Its hate map even helped shooter Floyd Lee Corkins find the location of the Family Research Council, where he shot and wounded five people.”

Factcheck.org, Fake News Codex, OpenSources, and PolitiFact were also involved in the study alongside Golding.

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Washington Post Scrubs Headline Calling Louis Farrakhan ‘Far-Right’

Barack Obama and Louis Farrakhan (Askia Muhammad via TriceEdnyWire.com)

By Justin Caruso

UPDATE 5:23 PM EST: The Washington Post has added a correction to the post in question — after this article was published. The paper held off on a correction on its site for nearly two hours after acknowledging the error on Twitter. The headline on Breitbart’s story has been updated to reflect this change.

The Washington Post described Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “far-right” Thursday, then scrubbed the error from the article’s headline and text without acknowledging the edit.

The far-left newspaper’s coverage of Facebook’s latest move to ban controversial and anti-establishment figures linked Farrakhan with conservative activists, originally posting the headline “Facebook bans far-right leaders including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous.’”

The false label was also included in the first line of author Elizabeth Dwoskin’s article.

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The publication’s official Twitter account posted the same headline with this false information. In a followup tweet, the Post said, “We have deleted this tweet because it incorrectly included Louis Farrakhan, who has espoused anti-Semitic views, in a list of far-right leaders. Facebook banned extremist figures including Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous.’”

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However, the paper has not acknowledged any error on the article page itself — or told readers that its editors altered the headline, lead paragraph, and URL after publication.

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Despite the stealth correction, the article has received the endorsement of NewsGuard, a Microsoft partner that marks news sources as reliable or not in a web browser extension — even on a cached version of the article with the false “far-right” label still included in the URL.

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“This website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard’s standards of credibility and transparency,” a pop-up reads when users mouse over the green checkmark next to the Post‘s name. Among those criteria: “Regularly corrects or clarifies errors.”

NewsGuard similarly defended a stealth edit from corporate media in February, saying that the New York Times did not run afoul of its policy by altering a headline without acknowledging the update.

Another article published in The Atlantic about the Facebook bans used the headline “Instagram and Facebook Ban Far-Right Extremists,” with a photo of Farrakhan in the featured image. As of this writing, it has not been corrected.

Farrakhan, who has praised Adolf Hitler and promotes an anti-Semitic and black nationalist worldview, has a number of well-documented relationships with Democratic lawmakers.

Former president Barack Obama posed for a photo with Farrakhan, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) have long associatedwith the hateful preacher.

Last October, Farrakhan said during an address that he was not an “antisemite” but an “anti-Termite.”

“So when they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater, you know they do, call me an antisemite–stop it! I’m anti-termite! I don’t know nothing about hating somebody because of their religious preference,” he said

 

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Leftist Activists Force Mastercard to Vote On Blacklisting The ‘Far Right’

By Chris Menahan

The ability to buy and sell goods and services may soon require folks to hold the “right” politically correct beliefs. 

From Tim Pool:

Activist group “The Sum Of Us” has successfully forced Mastercard to hold a vote that would see the creation of a “human rights committee” to oversee who uses the Mastercard service.

The goal of the leftist activist group is to shut down access for ‘far right’ groups as well as politicians and activists. They stress that stopping to flow of income will stop people they do not agree with.

This may be the most dramatic escalation in the Culture War we have seen yet, the targeting of major financial institutions to shut down opposition. While it sounds noble to ban certain groups we do not like it won’t end there. Massive multi national corporations should not have the right to sever access to basic services based on bad opinions.

Far left social justice activists have pushed for restrictions and censorship and this news marks the most dramatic escalation we have seen yet.

More from Breitbart:

In its supporting statement, ThisIsUs wrote:

Companies can face risks related to human rights even when they only perform support functions. Internet infrastructure companies like web host GoDaddy, social media platform Facebook and payments firm PayPal have come under pressure for doing business with or providing a forum for neo-Nazis and other hate groups. Mastercard has received negative publicity for processing of payments to white supremacist groups. “Organizers Catch Credit Card Companies Profiting From White Supremacy: Online payment companies are complicit in authorizing transactions related to hate groups,” AlterNet, August 22, 2017; and “Color Of Change Is Attacking Hate Groups At The Source: Their Funding,” Fast Company, August 21, 2017. According to the website bloodmoney.org (accessed on December 18, 2018), Mastercard continues to process payments for organizations such as American Border Patrol, League of the South, Proud Boys and Stormfront.

In response, the board of Mastercard recommended that stockholders vote against the proposal, stating that the company operates on the principle that consumers should be able to make “all lawful purchases.”

The Proposal focuses on the use of our products by certain organizations. We operate our network on the principle that consumers should be able to make all lawful purchases, and our franchise rules ensure compliance with the laws pertaining to the acceptable use of our payment processing services by merchants, acquirers and issuers. We regularly monitor activities involving our products and services for any alleged illegal use. When we process payment transactions, we do not have visibility into goods that are purchased or the use of those goods. When we are made aware of illegal activity or rules violations, we work closely with law enforcement and acquirers to shut down those activities.

Accordingly, because Mastercard has a committee with oversight over issues of corporate social responsibility and has disclosed its commitment to and oversight of human rights issues, the Board does not believe that establishing a separate human rights committee is necessary to properly exercise its oversight of this important area, nor does it add to Mastercard’s existing commitment to social responsibility and human rights.Therefore, our Board recommends that our stockholders vote AGAINST this joint proposal.

Although Mastercard’s board says it is committed to the principle of allowing “all lawful purchases,” online payments platform Patreon says that Mastercard asked it to withdraw service from Islam critic Robert Spencer, founder of JihadWatch.org, in August 2018.

Mastercard has yet to respond to a Breitbart News inquiry into why, if Patreon’s allegation is true, the company used its influence to cut off Spencer.

Multiple cases with Mastercard, Chase Bank and Bank of America suggest these megabanks are already doing a “belief check.”

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COLLUSION: Liberal Media Was Tipped Off About Paul Joseph Watson Being Banned by Facebook Before He Was

by Jim Hoft May 2, 2019

As reported earlier today, Facebook announced that it had banned several high-profile conservative personalities from their platform for good, including an incoming ban on the Facebook-owned Instagram.

Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, and all accounts related to Alex Jones or Infowars (including Paul Joseph Watson) were the main targets of Facebook’s latest purge and were labeled ‘dangerous’ by the social media giant.

To draw away from criticism about only banning pro-Trump figures, Facebook also claimed to be taking action against Louis Farrakhan, the Hitler-loving Nation of Islam leader.

The company alleges that all individuals or accounts engaged in the following behaviors, according to a statement given to pro-censorship CNN reporter Oliver Darcy.

The Facebook spokesperson said such factors include whether the person or organization has ever called for violence against individuals based on race, ethnicity, or national origin; whether the person has been identified with a hateful ideology; whether they use hate speech or slurs in their about section on their social media profiles; and whether they have had pages or groups removed from Facebook for violating hate speech rules.

Darcy, who himself has been personally involved in lobbying digital platforms to ban his political enemies, also claims that the company may end up banning accounts that share content related to any of the banned individuals.

Facebook tipped off the liberal media before they notified Paul Joseph Watson of his account being banned. Watson was banned — not because of his content — but because he works for Inforwars.

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Paul tweeted out earlier.

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Not likely.

Paul Joseph Watson’s YouTube videos and writings at Infowars are exceptional.
He has never come under fire for hate speech.
The Republican Party continues to be AWOL.

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