Covid and US presidential elections, increasingly less neutral social networks: Facebook unleashed in censoring Trump’s commercials
The big social networks , increasingly at the center of information and public debate, are less and less neutral and more and more prone to censorship (by the way), with unacceptable interference that accidentally intensified during the period of Covid and the American election campaign . On the one hand, the various Facebook , YouTube (Google) and Twitter intervene by censoring debates, opinions and statements, as well as "uncomfortable" users, even institutional positions, obviously only for a certain part, for example Trump's tweets on the need to put an end to the riots in American cities, but not those of Iranian Supreme Guide Khamenei on Israel ("a malignant cancer that must be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen"). On the other hand, they do nothing to counteract the real and very serious problems of the Internet (such as uncontrolled defamation and false profiles used in a malevolent way) and for profit reasons they willingly bow to the appetites of the worst world regimes as regards respect for the law. information and freedom of expression.
After having made a clean sweep of any vision that differs from the "right" one on the management of the pandemic and of any idea other than the shaky ones of the World Health Organization (which, in addition to not having hit one, has already changed its infallible countless times positions, so logically it would be the first to have to be censored and silenced), now Big Tech , openly deployed, is "dealing" with the American presidential elections.
Facebook has begun to censor political advertisements that are "rejected" by fact checking . But that's not all, because, beyond the very strong doubts about the legitimacy of the practice and the impartiality of the verifiers, in at least two recent cases the announcements were judged "mostly false" by PolitiFact and blocked by the social network despite the claims contained were been recognized as true. It happened to a pro-Trump commercial that directly quotes Biden declaring "If you elect me, your taxes will be increased, not reduced" and warns that his plan will raise taxes "for all income groups." Apart from the vulnus underlying the silencing of the political debate, was the spot that belongs to America First really "mostly false" ? No, because reading the report of the same fact checking it can be deduced that according to some experts Biden's plan will actually result in higher taxes for all income groups. So what would be the problem with the announcement? A phantom lack of "context" (which is very easy to provide, admitted and not granted that it is reasonable to expect it in a 30-second advertisement) and the risk that it could give a "wrong impression" on what Biden meant, given that the plan would affect higher incomes more than low ones. In short, from the climbing on mirrors (or rather, on the screens) it emerges that the commercial says true things, but it is better that they are not known, otherwise the Americans (70 percent of whom use Facebook and 40 percent of whom use for information) could get confused and end up voting for the wrong candidate.
America First – which assured the Daily Wire that it will continue to fight against partisan fact checkers and to defend one of the most fundamental constitutionally protected rights during a crucial period like that of a presidential election – is not the only conservative organization censored by platform. In another recent episode, again with the game of "missing context and could mislead people", Facebook censored an American Principles Project announcement that said the opening to transgender athletes under the Democratic-backed Equality Act "will destroy women's sports ".
In cases like this, the maxim delivered by well (de) thinking people is always something like: “They are private companies, they can do whatever they want. If their rules don't suit you, you can always go elsewhere ”. Who knows what the same well (de) thinking people would say if hypothetically a private transport company, being free to do what it wants as a private company, decided to exclude blacks from the service, for example. And social networks , which despite being private have a prominent public role, now carry the ideas and in hindsight the lives of many more people than are taken over by all the transport companies of the globe put together. The small detail is that they are transporting them more and more with methods that have little to envy to the horrendous ones of apartheid .
The post Covid and US presidential elections, increasingly less neutral social networks: Facebook unleashed in censoring Trump's commercials appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/covid-e-presidenziali-usa-social-sempre-meno-neutrali-facebook-scatenata-nel-censurare-gli-spot-di-trump/ on Mon, 21 Sep 2020 03:37:00 +0000.