The Censorship has begun
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This is not mildly infuriating. Its incredibly worrying.
someone should make c/incrediblyworrying
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
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.
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.
Time in USA: 1935, Germany
Don’t share this. The stylization is too cool to allow the assholes to see it and use it.
Nah, I’d rather push them into embracing actual, full on nazi symbology. Believe it or not, the majority of the American public do not see republicans as nazis. The sooner they look like it, the sooner the last plausible deniability falls, and the sooner the “cheaper eggs,” “voted for the economy” idiots have to face the realities of their decisions.
Maybe we are witnessing a modern day version of the Business Plot.
I dont even know how to react to this. It feels like my reaction to everything has been holy shit this is fucking insane. I’m burnt out, I just need to tend to my own garden. I cant have sympathy for people who support the right and these stupid social media platforms.
I have that same thought, but then I think this is exactly how all the non-Jewish people felt as hitler was rising to power. I end up getting even more angry and looking up where to buy fertilizer.
Love the double entendre. Are you tending your garden harder, or blowing up Parliament?
Completely unrelated to the topic, but did you know you can make crude gunpowder called “black powder” using only sulfur and saltpeter (KNO3) fertilizers and charcoal?
Yes
We are starting a homestead and getting away from all the fuss.
That’s kind of the point. A constant barrage of stupid and dangerous shit to keep you enraged until you burn put. You cannot stay enraged for four years and nobody will care to do anything if it’s a constant stream of small and big steps to fascism. They’re not removing all liberties at once, but in a lot of steps so that it becomes impossible to agree on which step becomes the straw to break the camel’s back.
Protip: Disconnect yourself from the online media circus.
Bring yourself up to speed with current developments once a week.
And focus your energy on helping people around you who need help.You can’t stop fascism all by yourself. But you can affect your immediate surroundings.
And if enough people do that, there will be resistance everywhere.
I thought they were gonna promote more political content
Yeah but only the right political conten
(The choice of definition for the word right is left to the reader)
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.
It’s hard emotionally
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.
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.
Could’ve happened to anybody, really.
Silly Copilot. My bad folks, it’s this crazy AI.
Yes, and automatically follow JD Vance and Trump. Totally a bug /s
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.
This has happened dozens of times, each time it was an “error”. Press X to doubt.
Looks like Zuckerberg needs a “red shell”…
I vote for the blue shell, it never misses
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.)
“Fact checkers are politically sided”
Benito Mussolini is often attributed with the quote: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
No one can argue the US isn’t corporatist.
Is this true? Can anyone confirm this?
Confirmed in instagram in the EU.
Yes, I confirmed. I live in Germany and hashtags like democrat or berniesanders are blocked and hashtags like Republican and donaldjtrump are not blocked.
I was only on Instagram for my friends to exchange reels and post life updates like once a year but this crosses another line. Migrating from all these monopolies is such a tax on my time but this is a small way to hurt these big giants.
I recommend everyone do the same when they have the time. I’d like to learn about RSS feeds and go back to a bunch of individual blogs for friends and family. Decentralized power is I guess the most important characteristic to look for these days. Fuck, this correction period is going to suck.
Confirmed
Happens if you search #berniesanders too but mot #donaldtrump
Also happening on TikTok now after the “ban”.
Just tested in in the EU with a friend’s Instagram account. It’s real.
You can google it, it’s like that for many people.
I can search #domocrat again, but not #fuckputin or #prochoice etc.
You can also test for yourself, this screenshot was from my instagram search
Don’t worry! Free Speech Republicans AGAINST Censorship will be FURIOUS when they hear about this!
What’s a two party state that’s one party down?
Sounds a bit like a…dictatorship
Simple democracy.
So basic you can hardly tell it’s there!
