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Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

• prvc 4y ago
  Title (and headline of TFA) is misleading, as Facebook didn't ban a film, it rejected a user from using its ads program based on the film's title. Will be interesting to see if the lawsuit goes anywhere.
  • mynameisvlad 4y ago
    It banned a film from its ad program. And the user who tried to advertise it. And the composer of the title track. I mean, they're not banned from Facebook, but the title didn't say that either. It said that the company Facebook banned a film. Which it did.
    • lupire 4y ago
      They can presumably advertise the film under a different title, with a clickthrough to info with the proper title. Facebook should have better credibility vetting, for things like movies distributed by recognized distributors with a good reputation.
      • prvc 4y ago
        Interestingly, according to the IMDB, the "blue eyes" title is already the second one used for the film. Why they'd choose something so dicey by Facebook's standards, when Facebook ads were supposedly such a crucial part of their business plan is unclear.
      • mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Not the composer, who had his entire account suspended from the ads platform for this. I assume the ad account for the film also would have also similarly been suspended.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bwb 4y ago
  I was just talking to an author who published an ad on Facebook for their sci fi book. They had the word "beat" in the ad. The FB algo said that words intills people to violence, banned her account for 2 months, and kept all the ad money. Funny enough, her book is about the dangers of an algorithm-based AI supersystem... Facebook is the worst.
  • petre 4y ago
    By the same twisted logic, the Beat Generation instills people to violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation
    • WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
      What about the Beatles?!
      • marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Beat less? Seems to promote peace.
        • manholio 4y ago
          Les might not agree.
        • panxyh 4y ago
          But less is more
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
  • thriftwy 4y ago
    How come they get to keep money for the service not provided? Should be strictly illegal.
• benj111 4y ago
  We really need to stop thinking about social networking sites as private companies, and think about them as the public spaces they actually are. It isn't good for society for a few companies to have a strangle hold on what can be said online. I do kind of feel for them in some ways because you have different nations with different norms and laws, but the answer isn't some lowest common denominator, and ridding the web of anything, anyone may find objectionable.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    Why should we consider them public spaces when they are private companies? And social media companies only control what is said on their platform not "online" aka the entire internet as you said
    • ben_w 4y ago
      > Why should we consider them public spaces when they are private companies? As the other commenter is suggesting a change to the status quo, what legal status they have now isn't important, but instead what matters is role they serve in society. Personally I think the US idea of freedom of speech is too anarchic to be sustainable, but even with that, the de-facto power that Big Tech has over communication (and commerce) means I think Big Tech should be held to a similar standard in this regard as any government.
      • themitigating 4y ago
        What power do they have?
        • ben_w 4y ago
          Big Tech? The power of their algorithms that decide who sees what content and when. The power to remove people from platforms that are competing to become de facto standards for communication, and to do so for reasons not limited to their legal obligations.
• Zealotux 4y ago
  The reason is the movie being titled "Beautiful Blue Eyes", we live in a time of pure insanity.
  • mynameishere 4y ago
    • Timshel 4y ago
      Ironic ? per the article : "the film’s title, which refers to the eye color of a child who perished at the hands of the Nazis and invokes a key scene in the movie"
      • SamBam 4y ago
        That doesn't mean it's not ironic. It strains belief to suggest that the film makers weren't aware of Hitler's belief that being blond and blue-eyed was a mark of the "superior" Aryan race
        • job_suche 4y ago
          Seems to me that the author was just propagating "the blue eyes are so beautiful" sort of white standard of beauty, probably not intentionally, and it would be a minor thing, except in this case it just does not fit, imho, given the topic.
        • pessimizer 4y ago
          ITT, both bigots and anti-racists pretending that they know someone's obvious intentions based on no information and with no attempt at research.
        • dekhn 4y ago
          Yes, and? Still not a reason to prevent advertising the movie on Facebook.
  • LegitShady 4y ago
• darthrupert 4y ago
  Recently Farcebook has started recommending incredibly toxic anti-SJW shit to me for no apparent reason. Either they turned the "let's incite toxicity" knob to 11 or somebody is seriously abusing them.
  • AlexandrB 4y ago
    Indeed. By US standards I'm somewhere left of Bernie but I keep getting recommended Jordan Peterson reels on Instagram. Not sure what's going on.
  • ben_w 4y ago
    Possibly, but not the only explanations — my feed is now more than 50% suggested/promoted content, including Fox News Tampa, even though I'm living in a different city in a different state in a different country in a different continent and almost all of my friends are further to the left than even the left-most US Democrat. If I had to guess, the bottom has fallen out of the advertising market and every business reliant on selling adverts is getting desperate.
    • noneeeed 4y ago
      The FB feed has become utterly drenched in suggested content, 99% of which is trash. I'm sure they will see some short term bump but I've got to wonder if this is finally the end for them. I'm certainly not bothering to check it any more.
      • Bakary 4y ago
        Facebook still has billions of users. It's just that its hope lies outside of the West
        • lupire 4y ago
          The money isn't outside the West...yet.
    • somat 4y ago
• obayesshelton 4y ago
  This is because Facebook is a Publisher. They will never admit it but FB/META can decide what users can see. This is the what a Publisher does. The issue we have is that if you let the users decide what is shown on any platform it would be quite a mess.
  • nova22033 4y ago
    https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
    • criddell 4y ago
      I think you are responding to something the GP never said or implied. Meta wants you to think you are in charge of what you see but it isn't true and hasn't been for a while now. The algorithm decides. It acts as an editor pulling together a site tailored to whatever it thinks will maximize Meta revenue.
    • skizm 4y ago
      Devil's advocate here (I won't comment on if I agree with the argument or not), but this article seems to miss the point of the section 230 debate. All of the stuff here is about what the law is now. The objection most people have is that it shouldn't be like this and we need to change or remove section 230. It specifically allows sites to be biased while also not holding them legally accountable for anything they choose not to remove. Once a social media site hits a certain scale, they can completely control any narrative they want. Should this be allowed is the real question (imo).
      • kcplate 4y ago
        > to miss the point of the section 230 debate. All of the stuff here is about what the law is now This is something that kind of irritates me about Mike Masnick (who I generally enjoy reading). He always seems so focused on the current state of the law that he seems blind to the debate.
• Trifectaffe6 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • gambiting 4y ago
    >>This is fundamentally anti-White hate-porn that plays into tired and often ridiculously racist "Nazi" stereotypes. I literally cannot believe anyone would write this in earnest. Please tell me it's some kind of (very poor) joke.
    • thebooktocome 4y ago
      Whether or not OP is serious, people holding opinions like this (e.g., it’s possible to be racist against Nazis, who incidentally are not a race but rather a political affiliation) certainly exist. It’s a sad state of affairs.
      • throwawayhl 4y ago
        [flagged]
        • Timshel 4y ago
          [flagged]
          • pessimizer 4y ago
            > with atrocities which are not well known to western audiance You say that as if this is a position the west found itself in rather than put itself in. Westerners generally aren't interested in Chinese corpses except as a justification for making more of them.
        • PurpleRamen 4y ago
          [flagged]
          • 4y ago
• hrbf 4y ago
  > Mark Zuckerberg has created a monster that has no oversight. You don’t say? I’m shocked I tell you. Hopefully this will at least generate more buzz for the movie than Facebook could have.
  • pGuitar 4y ago
    They tell you that there's no oversight so that they aren't held responsible.
• fredgrott 4y ago
  Honest question, What would happen if we assume that those with low self esteem self-select to match the toxicity in their head in choices of social media consumption and choice of social media platforms? Somewhat the kissing-cousin to the observation that those 1-percenters on social media that create such as GaryVee do not use sm platforms like the bottom 99 percent. I.E., SM platforms are a mirror in showing that we still have somewhat a broken humanity society structure.
• piokoch 4y ago
  The problem is that no automatic method we have now will catch context. There is a difference between "Jews were murdered by Germans during war" and "Jews destroyed German economy before the war" that will not be recognized by any machine we have nowadays. The first is true, the second is bullshit, how algorithm can now this? More, even if Facebook employees humans to do moderation still for some contractor from Asia "Jews destroyed German economy before the war" might not be easy to verify. For a contractor maybe Jews did that, who cares, I have 20 seconds to moderate this and move to other post. The same way if I was asked to moderate some historical details about India-Pakistan conflict or other historical facts about Asia, Africa I have no knowledge about at all. I was reading quite a lot recently about war in Angola and still I have doubts which side was "good" and which was "bad", besides that people who lived there were hurt in the history like almost no other nation. Even worst. Some, especially historical, facts are judged from different perspective. For instance in Poland Napoleon Bonaparte is a mythologized person that brought hope to Polish hearts to get back their homeland [1]. From the point of view of someone from Austria or Italy, well, Napoleon is considered to be far from hero. We don't have to go back that far in the history. US intervention in Afghanistan or Iraq can be seen differently depending on somebody views. How to moderate all this? [1] Fun fact: not a big surprise that Napoleon didn't give a crap about Poland, he even refused to give them a proper King at the short time he could (he has chosen some Saxon prince). At the end, when Napoleon lost, remains of Polish military units were sent to Haiti to help France to maintain their colonies. Many Polish soldiers died from tropical illnesses there, many joined Haitians as they saw that those people were fighting for their freedom like Poles were.
  • peteradio 4y ago
    Provide services that force people to have skin in the game (non-anonymous and/or paid). Don't connect the whole goddamn world together, the world is not a melting pot. Let those in the network flag/block/defend/vouch so it aligns with whatever culture is on that particular network.
    • bwb 4y ago
      Maybe slight tweak to this "the world is a melting point, it just melts very slowly :)"
• dreen 4y ago
  I wonder if marketers could start exploiting this. Get something obviously innocent banned in a stupid way by algo, then use the outrage effect for promotion. They already kinda did this with people destroying stuff of companies that made some statements, this seems like the next step.
  • mjburgess 4y ago
    Ghostbuster's 2016's supposed "anti-feminism " campaign is an example of this. It's very common and has been forever, since at least newspapers.
    • SamBam 4y ago
      Is there evidence that the misogyny was faked by the movie industry? Or are we just assuming that all such reactions (e.g. the anti-black Ariel folks) are faked to generate support?
      • mjburgess 4y ago
        The reactions arent necessarily fake, its much more that they hunt out and push those (very small number) for the sake of publicity; and to offset and undermine the credibility of critics. No one really hears any attacks against GB 2016's critics now, but before release, they were all tantamount to racists and sexists.
      • dogleash 4y ago
        > are faked to generate support? No need to fake it. Just skew your presentation of reality to fit your narrative. https://youtu.be/UWROBiX1eSc?t=193 https://youtu.be/UWROBiX1eSc?t=193
• edwnj 4y ago
  I've been working with Alex for just over a year now. He’s never political, super nice guy, focused on creating beautiful art. This is a major blow to the team. If your not backed by Sony or Paramount, ads (especially in the first week) can be the deciding factor in whether you make it or not.. When he told me what happened, I refused to believe him "There is no way they banned you over blue eyes". Unlike Alex, I'm extremely cynical about censorship & social justice politics but even I couldn't accept they would do something this asinine.
  • prvc 4y ago
    > If your not backed by Sony or Paramount, ads (especially in the first week) can be the deciding factor in whether you make it or not.. Do you seriously believe it was Facebook that caused the film to fail?
    • edwnj 4y ago
      Not fail. The jury is still out. Independent films largely rely own word of mouth to gain momentum. But for word of mouth to work, you need critical mass. This is where ads can be the difference maker. We wanted to reach Roy Scheider fans. Those people are not exactly the type of people who use TikTok and reply with words like "No Cap". When you're an Independent filmmaker, you have to maximise the value out of every dollar and you have a short window of time (weeks) to make this work. So when facebook bans you from advertising on fb & insta right before the release, its a major blow.
    • unethical_ban 4y ago
      Do you seriously challenge the idea that social media advertising can be critical to a small film's success?
• hfbff 4y ago
  "This is the action of haters – and there are sadly many in our society – who seek to damage the film in order to trivialize the Holocaust" Newton told Rolling Stone at the Toronto Film Festival. There are a lot of stupid things Facebook is doing, but why, of all things, would you accuse them of trivializing the Holocaust? If anything, this kind of accusations (using the Holocaust as a defense for everything) trivializes the Holocaust.
  • blueflow 4y ago
    Thats the current zeitgeist. Making extreme accusations, devaluing them and training people to not believe them per default. The chaotic evil in me loves this because it opens up many ways to get away with bad takes.
  • himinlomax 4y ago
    Why? To force them to respond.
  • DoctorOW 4y ago
    I think this might be implicitly accusing holocaust deniers of mass reporting and spreading misinformation about the content of the film so it gets pushed up the reporting queue and a Google search returns at least some results that appear to verify the false claims. This happens often enough to be recognized in marginalized communities.
• croes 4y ago
  So what skin color can a person with blue eyes have? Every possible.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  Does anyone know if these decisions are made by U.S. based checkers, or is it outsourced? When FB does something so asinine like this I must consider that it’s a horrible cubicle farm in S.E. Asia.
  • scohesc 4y ago
    I bet you my now defunct and cobwebbed Facebook account that they're using AI algorithms for large-scale content moderation, with individual "suspect" cases being forwarded to an Amazon Mechanical Turk style place where people make pennies on the dollar following strict lists of instructions where any deviation or any leeway in free-thought is punished by immediate dismissal.
• jleyank 4y ago
  I assume they ban pretty much everything about the period 1925 to 1945 as race, national origin and probably gender was real prominent. And talk about the violence…
  • teh_klev 4y ago
    I follow a FB group where the topic is the International Brigades, many of the discussions and posts are about the Spanish civil war, though not exclusively. Race, national origin, sex and violence are freely discussed and the group doesn't seem to attract any untoward attention by FB's algo's.
    • jleyank 4y ago
      I would think that inconsistency in how things are banned would increase FB’s legal risk, but maybe they (like all rich things) are exempt from legal risk?
• job_suche 4y ago
  I mean, that is also the first thought I had when I read the title, even before delving into the article. If instead of "beautiful blue eyes" it was "silky smooth pale white skin", would it then be different? For once I think Facebook is right. Poor choice of a film title, that, especially considering the theme of the film.
  • ReptileMan 4y ago
    There were lots of people with beautiful blue eyes and silky smooth pale white skin that perished in the Holocaust... Eyeballing the difference between Ashkenazi and a regular person from Central or Eastern Europe is mission impossible.
    • mynameisvlad 4y ago
      [flagged]
    • job_suche 4y ago
      • lupire 4y ago
        This is literally the core point of the damn movie. I assure you that the director was aware.
  • etchalon 4y ago
    I assume the title is making a deliberate point.
• lbriner 4y ago
  There still seem to be some many basics that FB and YouTube get wrong with their "automatic" video moderation. Use people's "report" button clicks as an early indicator that something should be looked at - a big flag. Look at certain words or phrases that are either unambiguously bad or possibly like "kill" or "why I hate ..." - a medium flag Phrases that are less certain, = a small flag. Block some things proactively, moderate others, react to the others as they are reported. I don't think people are bothered that bad stuff gets posted as much as these companies not doing anything about it when it is reported. If 1000 people flag a video, up to the top of the list. If the flagging is malicious, then downgrade the reputation of the accounts that flagged it. If new accounts upload stuff, rate-limit it in some way etc. I know I am making it sound really easy but with how ever many 1000 Developers, it shouldn't be impossible for someone like FB to do this much better.
  • greggeter 4y ago
  • Kerrick 4y ago
    "Why I hate killing spiders & how to ethically rid your house of pests" -- Not flag-worthy at all.
    • humanrebar 4y ago
      Browse urbandictionary and you'll find a lot of benign nouns that are insulting or that are slurs. Prediction: there's a definition of 'spider' that is offensive up there... be right back. Let's see... almost? There's one referring to an unattractive and disproportionate person: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spider https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spider I know urbandictionary has a lot of made up stuff, but the point is that slang is sometimes coded intentionally. Especially in unpopular niche subcultures.
• ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  The real issue here isn't that an algorithm flagged it, but that a "human" reviewed it and upheld the ban. Either a human didn't actually review the film or there's a serious lack of training.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    I think something has happened behind the scenes at Facebook where there are actually not really humans doing the secondary "review" or appeals process. See my other comment on this article for another (less important) example. I'm guessing they're simply passing at least some % of them through a secondary automatic classification system. Why would you let fairness get in the way of revenues?
• Pulcinella 4y ago
  This is basically the ad for the movie now. I’ve never heard of in until now, but now I’m interested. “Come see the anti-Nazi movie Facebook doesn’t want you to know about!”
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tlogan 4y ago
  The biggest problem with this AI approach is that actual bad ads (scam, spreading hate, etc.) are getting thru.
• Aulig 4y ago
  My ad account got randomly shut down a few days ago too. Was reapproved after review but never was I given a reason. I hate that big companies can get away with this.
  • mola 4y ago
    I sympathize with your frustration. I do wonder though... a lot of the ability for these companies to even exist at this scale is because they use a small amount of ppl in the loop. So was it worth it to let these behemoths prosper so we can get these services for a low price, but suffer these sort of consequences?
    • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      It's not worth it and there needs to be a real alternative. Unfortunately at the scale things have gotten to, it might take regulatory action. Because the market is not going to be able to compete here.
• rthomas6 4y ago
  This is like the modern day version of not being able to search for Moby Dick on my high school's library computer.
  • bslorence 4y ago
    Except you probably didn't get permanently banned from using the library when you tried to search for that.
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      Reminds me of how ignorant people used to be about computers 25 years ago. That could totally still happen in some areas.
• yuan43 4y ago
  I can only hope that Facebook follows this policy to the letter now and into the future. In fact, it would be a gift to humanity to widen the scope to any an all content deemed offensive to anyone. Ban it all. Nothing will hasten the downfall of the monstrosity that Facebook has become faster that the strictest possible adherence to and advancement of this policy.
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Here we are, deep down in the dystopia of Automatic Content Classification by robots. Far less important of an example, but I was just put in "Facebook jail" for 24 hours for posting a picture of my son at the beach in his bathing suit with no shirt. Y'know, as one does at the beach. I can only assume it's because my son has long hair and the Convolutional Neural Network or whatever decided he was a girl and therefore I'm a pervert. Sadly it was the "appeal" I submitted that got me blocked. Presumably by a "human", but who knows. Before I appealed they were simply going to not show the picture. Appealing got me in "trouble." That might be even worse than the original misclassification. On top of that, if I was actually a "community standards" violator who posted potential child exploitation imagery, I'm not sure how a 24-hour ban on activity on Facebook is of any use, either? Except I'm terrified to imagine a world where Meta might have called police on me based on the output of a neural network image classification. Others have said but I'll say it again: This kind of business doesn't scale ethically. You can't have billions of people on a bulletin board. It doesn't work. Moderation is essential to modern communication. But you can't do moderation automatically or at scale and in a universal way. Very dark patterns emerge the moment you go FAANG scale and toss algorithms tuning for advertising and "engagement" into the mix, and attempt to do so with the help of computers. "Sad" as it is, we will need to "retreat" back into smaller forums and BBSs where communities self-police. Facebook has infiltrated so many aspects of society. Want to interact with the parents from the local school your kids go to? You have to do that on Facebook. Event announcements? Keeping in touch with your distant aunt? Facebook. If something like Facebook is really a universal utility, it will have to be put under public administration; like the post office. But clearly, that isn't going to happen and would have other problems. I am going to have to find some other way to engage with old friends and family. Frank Herbert had some intuition with his whole "Butlerian Jihad" thing.
  • jquery 4y ago
    We don’t just need human moderation, we need due process. These companies control too much of our digital lives and make so much money from us, but have zero regard for us as soon as it’s inconvenient to investigate a case, because that would cut into their insane margins. I was permabanned for Twitter recently merely for getting the attention of some large influencers who disagreed with me (no actual rule was broken, but I received enough reports that my account was nuked). I appealed multiple times but Twitter’s appeal process is a sham for us little people. I doubt any humans ever looked at my account.
• chrisbrandow 4y ago
  Bizarre that they stuck with the ban after an appeal. Seems like a pretty obvious thing to fix
• etchalon 4y ago
  This will get overturned shortly due to press attention. Which, sadly, is the only way large scale network moderation can work. Get it "mostly" right, but often wrong. In most of the cases you get it wrong, only a few people will notice. You'll never hear about it. Occasionally, you'll get it so wrong a lot of people notice and you will hear about it. Then you can fix it. Rinse and repeat.
• wellbehaved 4y ago
  Censorship morons on parade. Obviously we need to return to a First Amendment ethos. Obviously we never should have abandoned it in the first place.
• liampulles 4y ago
  Why not put the power in the hands of the users? If a person does not want to see a film that deals with race (generally), let them go and flip a switch in their settings to hide these from their view (and similar for whatever other subject may be of potential concern).
  • lupire 4y ago
    The issue has (almost) nothing to do with the film content. The issue is with the verbiage in the title, used in the ad. And it's not about who wants to see the content, it's about censoring potential race warriors.
• BrainVirus 4y ago
  This is not an exception. This is the norm. All major social media platforms operate under the assumption that it's better to ban 100 innocent people than to let one "bad" person publish something. The scale of censorship is ming-boggling. The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN is even more astounding. The big lie of online censorship is that controversial cases where most people think the person "deserves" to be banned are unrelated and totally separate from cases like this one, where it's obvious the ban is preposterous to anyone possessing common sense. They are directly related. They are created by the same systems built under the same assumptions with the same mentality. This is not going to be fixed by "better" algorithms, because it's not an issue with the quality of the algorithms in the firs place. The algorithms seem low-quality to you because you're judging them by a standard the company running them didn't use.
  • yandrypozo 4y ago
    > The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN is even more astounding. After reading some of the comments here you're absolutely right :(
    • jimbob45 4y ago
      Use two line breaks to put your content on a new line. If you use one, it will all be under the same line like happened to your comment here.
  • cies 4y ago
    > All major social media platforms operate under the assumption that it's better to ban 100 innocent people than to let one "bad" person publish something. Unless they pay for their publications (aka ads), in that case FB has a history of letting the most horrible shit slip "regrettably through their screening team". Bollocks.
    • classified 4y ago
      Did you even read TFA? This is about payed advertising for the film on FB.
• jquery 4y ago
  • kbelder 4y ago
    What's "Terf"? A name?
    • rat87 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERF Trans exclusionary radical feminist Although sometimes directed at people ho are just transphobes, it's aimed at some feminist who don't consider trans women women or trans men men and have a very negative anti trans views. See JK Rowling controversy
  • soundnote 4y ago
    It could easily have a liberal bias and still ban you unjustly. STFU is hardly anything compared to people wishing their opponents got raped.
• fullshark 4y ago
  These type of editorial / advertising approval decisions happened all the time before the internet took over media. Just FB/Twitter gets crucified when they do it because they pretend to not be publishers but utilities. Time to admit all these hosting sites are just publishers that use ML models as editors and their users as contributors and section 230 needs to be re-written to account for it.
  • soundnote 4y ago
    Orwell himself wrote of it in his preface to Animal Farm: https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm > Any fair-minded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ʻco-ordinationʼ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. > Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ʻit wouldn't doʼ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ʻnot doneʼ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ʻnot doneʼ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. > At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticise our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them presently, but the prevailing attitude towards the USSR is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group. ... > It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of ʻvested interestsʼ. The best-known case is the patent medicine racket. Again, the Catholic Church has considerable influence in the press and can silence criticism of itself to some extent. A scandal involving a Catholic priest is almost never given publicity, whereas an Anglican priest who gets into trouble (e.g. the Rector of Stiffkey) is headline news. It is very rare for anything of an anti-Catholic tendency to appear on the stage or in a film. Any actor can tell you that a play or film which attacks or makes fun of the Catholic Church is liable to be boycotted in the press and will probably be a failure. > But this kind of thing is harmless, or at least it is understandable. Any large organisation will look after its own interests as best it can, and overt propaganda is not a thing to object to. One would no more expect the Daily Worker to publicise unfavourable facts about the USSR than one would expect the Catholic Herald to denounce the Pope. But then every thinking person knows the Daily Worker and the Catholic Herald for what they are. What is disquieting is that where the USSR and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from Liberal writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed. > This rule has been almost universally observed since 1941, but it had operated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realised, for ten years earlier than that. Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly me whole of the highbrow press. > Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. This attitude was usually defended on the ground that the international situation, and me urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it; but it was clear that this was a rationalisation. The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on me wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in me purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in me Ukraine. And if this was true before the war, the intellectual atmosphere is certainly no better now.
• waffletower 4y ago
  Facebook has an explicit policy regarding Holocaust denial content: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/removing-holocaust-denial-content/ https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/removing-holocaust-denial-... Given their human-reviewed decision to "permanently restrict" the advertising of "Beautiful Blue Eyes", this policy appears to be a disingenuous public relations stance. As director Joshua Newton contends, Facebook's tunnel vision adherence to their keyword flagging algorithm acts as a significant agent for the Holocaust denial movement.
• 20amxn20 4y ago
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  First we demanded they censor things. Then we got upset they censored things. Turns out, there isn't one global human standard on what is worthy of being censored. And this is one reason people only think they support censorship, when they really don't...
• hatzalam 4y ago
  Myself and at least one of my friends have been harassed by an Instagram account whose name is "white_soupremacy". They seemingly have no content, and the sole purpose is to harass/troll other accounts. I reported this account to IG, but since the spelling is cheeky itself, it wasn't flagged as hate speech. Furthermore, IG didn't even give me an option to have a manual review of the account. I DMed someone I know that works at Meta, gave them all of the relevant information, but the account is STILL up even after a PM at Meta submitted an internal report. Something is deeply broken in that system.
• NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  Facebook and Censorship are synonymous
• shabbatt 4y ago
  Book burning used to be a thing. Now its content moderation.
• Dr_ReD 4y ago
  We shouldn't accept this dystopia heads down. We all should call for regulation to stop this enormous companies and their algorithms, from treating everyone else as insignificant rounding errors.
• aurelien 4y ago
  They should think to bans themselves for dystopian mechanisms
• FunnyBadger 4y ago
  With the recently court decision against social media company censorship, this may become a major legal problem for Facebook. https://www.dailywire.com/news/fifth-circuit-deals-huge-legal-blow-to-social-media-censorship-upholds-texas-law-banning-it https://www.dailywire.com/news/fifth-circuit-deals-huge-lega... We can only hope!!
• psuresh 4y ago
  'Bigteched'