False: 10 of the 15 deadliest days in American history occurred in the past two weeks
This chart is making the rounds on social media. It leaves out so many things as to be declared False by me.
Censorship study finds censorship growing rapidly, worldwide, even in “free” countries
The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. Source: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies | University of Michigan News
TV news producer says all “news” is driven by ratings
A national TV news producer says all news is basically driven by ratings – not importance or value to the viewer. Most news is intentionally devoid of context and facts.
Social media: 2 years ago, Google shut down the blog, email and all services of a prominent statistician
In 2017, without warning or recourse, Google shut down all services associated with Salil Mehta, a professor of statistics, editor of a statistics journal, author of a best selling book on statistics, a former Obama administration official and later, a polling statistics adviser to the Trump campaign. His offense? He ran a blog about mathematics! Google, Facebook and Twitter have become the totalitarian governments of the 21st century, stifling speech their algorithms choose to flag. Unlike us peons, Mehta is well connected and a huge outcry caused Google to reinstate his account.
Climate Communications: 60+ news outlets sign on to coordinated, global “Covering Climate Now” messaging campaign
Newspapers worldwide have agreed to jointly engage in a global Covering Climate Now project, where newspapers and other news outlets simultaneously use their advocacy journalism to persuade readers to take action on climate. This is indistinguishable from a global, coordinated propaganda operation and may back fire, turning people off from understanding and undertaking meaningful actions on climate issues.
NBC acknowledges news story headline was fiction
NBC makes a major error in reporting on a Trump speech and then retracts its claim, on Twitter – but leaves the original incorrect headline and incorrect video online. NBC News had the story completely wrong.
Twitter gives greater visibility to those with a verified “blue check mark” account status
Tweets published by those with verified “blue check mark” accounts get greater visibility on Twitter. Twitter also admitted to using algorithms to shadow banning 600,00 accounts including those of U.S. Congressional representatives. Twitter is a mess.
Twitter CEO admits they were unfairly “filtering” a.k.a. shadow banning 600,000 accounts
Twitter’s failed algorithm censored people based on their assessment of their followers, over which the censored person has no control. This caused Twitter to effectively shadow ban over 600,000 accounts, including those belonging to members of Congress.
Twitter admits to shadow banning users
This sure looks like an admission of shadow banning – this from Twitter:
“We want to be clear that we do not shadow ban according to political ideology or viewpoint. We do rank the timeline and we do that with the principle of relevance, but all the content is still there — you just have to do more work to see it.”
Click on the title for more …
Did Vox advocate censoring social media? No.
This propaganda poster is now spreading online. The original Vox Tweet is here. It contains a link to a video explaining their thinking. They are clear in their video that they are not advocating censoring these individuals. The video concludes with the problems that emerge when speech is censored and the practical problems of policing platforms like YouTube that see 400 hours of new video uploaded every minute. The Vox video does not encourage censorship. Commentary There is, though, a…