4 ms·
What makes you think that Facebook is censoring you rather than an employee of Facebook who is being paid by somebody else? This is a classic technique of subve
by memracom 10y ago
What makes you think that Facebook is censoring you rather than an employee of Facebook who is being paid by somebody else? This is a classic technique of subversion. You don't have to control an organization or get their leaders on your side. You simply get some of your own people into that organization in jobs that have the powers that you want to exercise.
These people are sleepers (like the Manchurian candidate) who wait for instructions. To keep them on your side you pay them extra above and beyond the Facebook salary. And when you activate them to do your bidding, you pay them a bonus.
From the outside, it looks like the organization(Facebook) is unfair but in reality it has been subverted.
So, is there any evidence that this is anything other than subversion by a 3rd party political organization?
Free speech is clearly not the issue since there is no free speech in America today. Anyone who looks objectively at the media and free speech over a time scale in decades, will have noticed the steady erosion of free speech since the beginning of the Cold War.
Speech has been "captured" by powerful elites. What you see as an assault on free speech is simply one of those elites exercising one of their levers of power. The freedom of speech was already lost when those elites got away with capturing speech.
What people today see as "free speech" is only a phantom that is allowed to exist because it covers the real capture of speech. But whenever that phantom of free speech threatens to have a "material" impact, then the owners of the USA, clamp down and beat it back to a dull humming noise.
As Marie Antoinette said, let them eat cake. Or Juvenal who said about 2000 years ago, let them have bread and circuses.
- andybak 10y agoThis explanation feels much more plausible to me. Either that or it's just a cock-up. If it was a command from on high then it's the dumbest thing ever as it was obviously going to be noticed.
- jomamaxx 10y agoEven though your idea is worth consideration - I highly, highly doubt this is the case. Firstly - because FB is not having '3rd parties' do this kind of stuff. They are a smart company. Second - because FB just had a big PR error over this - and it boiled down to 'humans making decisions' about which 'trends' were important. The whistleblowers who actually did this type of work even indicated that it was not an FB policy - it was just the whims of the whoever happened to be doing it at the time. FB has since fired them all, and replaced them with algorithms, which hopefully are not as biased, but of course that's a difficult thing. FB as a company - and it's staff - are probably a little bit politically in one direction vis-a-vis the other, but I significantly doubt they are doing anything active, and also there just is not a lot of opportunity for 'Manchuican Candidates' to have such impact. In some cases, national leaders and security personnel will ask Facebook to 'do something' - Angela Merkel wanted FB to clamp down on 'racist messaging' for example, and I'll be action was taken. But this case is admittedly surprising. I don't see why they would block an account over a reasonable concern about PBS 'editing standards'.