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The demand for more speech and content regulation on the internet by Facebook might seem like turkeys voting for Christmas, but its a cunning plot designed to protect and advance the power of Facebooks unaccountable monopoly.

Mark Zuckerbergs article, Big Tech needs more regulation, published in the FT, is an extraordinary public admission that Facebook now accepts censorship as core to its future. Of course, this is not what it appears to say, but the truth will out, as they say.

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg argues that private companies should not arbitrate alone when it comes to fundamental democratic values like elections, harmful content, privacy and data portability. He asks, correctly, Who decides what counts as political advertising in a democracy? If a non-profit runs an ad about immigration during an election, is it political? He asks: Who should decide private companies, or governments?

These are good questions. His answers, however, are not.

The million-dollar or rather billion-dollar question Zuckerberg raises is how a Big Tech giant like Facebook can be held to account, given that it is a private company at liberty to regulate its platform and services as it likes. Its near monopoly, with almost 2.5 billion active users, not only dominates the social-media market in the US and Europe, it gives Facebook incredible power over an online republic with the freedom to regulate this new public sphere as they see fit.

Zuckerberg is concerned that this power is undermining peoples trust in Facebook because it doesnt need to answer to anyone. He wants more regulation to boost user trust. This is what has led him and Facebook to set up a new Independent Oversight Board so people can appeal Facebooks content decisions. This kind of regulation he says may hurt Facebooks business in the near term, but it will be better for everyone, including us, over the long term.

Zuckerberg is not stupid. But he thinks the public are. Closer scrutiny of the Oversight Board reveals how self-serving Facebooks road to Damascus regulatory conversion actually is.

First, the Oversight Board is being funded by Facebook as a separate company. So much for independence. It has selected its first director, Thomas Hughes, who will set up a separate company to recruit the 40-strong board, with Facebooks oversight. Hughes is a long-time advocate for freedom of information and expression, the former director of the equally unaccountable NGO Article 19.

Second, what criteria will be used to recruit 40 wise men and women who are impartial and worldly enough to represent 2.5 billion human beings from across every culture on the planet to decide what speech should be allowed in the worlds digital town square? Call me cynical, but unless the members of this virtual supreme court are to be angels summoned from above, everybody sitting on it will have earthly interests, prejudices and agendas of their own.

Third, and most important, will the Oversight Board have power to force Facebook to act upon its arbitration? Facebook users will only be able to seek recourse to the Oversight Board once they have gone through Facebooks direct appeals process. Facebook still retains the ability to decide if Oversight Board decisions are operationally feasible or would cost too much. They can choose instead to take into account arbitration decisions as guidance for future policymaking.

In short, Facebook still controls the wide-reaching changes to policy which means the Oversight Board is a paper tiger. It has no real oversight at all. And nor does the public have any oversight of it. Zuckerbergs 58 percent voting control over the Facebook board means he, not Facebook users, remains king of the castle.

And this is the point. The Oversight Board will provide Facebook with a great advantage: it will shield Zuckerberg and Facebook from scrutiny and state regulation. It could remove total culpability for policy blunders around censorship or political bias from Facebooks executives. And it will most definitely be used as a counter to future regulatory investigations for potential antitrust violations and other malpractice, as the company could hide behind the Oversight Board arguing Facebook is no longer free to pursue profit over whats fair for society.

While this is self-serving for Facebook, the Oversight Board represents a major problem for the rest of us.

Facebook is not really a public square, nor is it a government. They are free to do what so many are clamoring for from woke identitarians to governments to set aside hard-won free speech protections in favor of more restrictive ones. Whatever reservations people may have, they are being drowned out by the support Facebook is getting for more censorship and online protections.

The fundamental danger of this new direction for Facebook is that it has escalated the drive for online censorship. Regulating what we can say, see, hear and read will always result in further curbs, not less. The idea that views, particularly strongly held ones, should constantly be put to the test in conflict with others, is now anathema, a bygone age of yesteryear.

The public will no longer determine whats true and good. No, now we have Facebooks 40 unelected moral overlords to determine what can and cant be said or published. The ennoblement of these 40 individuals has transformed the rest of us into infants devoid of moral agency.

This is not an exaggeration. It should be kept in mind, indeed, shouted from the rooftops, that Facebook has more power to restrict free speech than any government, Supreme Court justice, any king or president, in history. They might not be able to jail dissenters. But they can silence them which amounts to the same thing.

No one voted for Zuckerberg nor the new director of the Oversight Board, Thomas Hughes. Nor will we vote for the 40-strong moral guardians of the Silicon Valley universe. If Zuckerberg was really intent on establishing an accountable body to oversee Facebook, why not ask Facebook users to crowdsource the elections of the Oversight Board members? Why not hold the worlds first global online elections where candidates have to publicize their free speech credentials, which we can vote on? Moreover, why not rewrite Facebooks rules so that the Oversight Board has the power to remove executive board members, including Mr Zuckerberg, for failure to implement arbitrations?

This might be a pipe dream. But it highlights the gap between Facebooks pretensions and the reality of its self-serving turn to regulation.

Whatever happened to their defense that they were a platform not a publisher and thus not in need of regulation? Their regulatory conversion is not about protecting free speech or users online. They have become the judge and jury of the online world to protect themselves and their profits. It is a cunning plot to ensure their unelected and unaccountable shadow will shroud us for years to come.

It can be stopped, however. Just say no: close down your Facebook account and rob them of your data. Then well see how the worlds first virtual totalitarian state fares without its oxygen.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Facebooks Oversight Board will be Zuckerbergs patsy censors, giving him cover as he aims to control all global information - RT

Netflix has recently published its annual Environmental, Social and Governance Report, documenting all the occasions when it has censored content on its streaming platform due to government requests.

According to the document, the streaming giant has taken down content on a governments request just nine times, all of which have been made over the past five years. Singapore tops the list, removing a total of five items, including The Last Temptation of Christ a title completely banned in the country a Brazilian comedy calledThe Last Hangover, and three cannabis-related shows, as weed is illegal in the Asian country. New Zealand had NetflixremoveThe Bridge, which the government considers objectionable, while Vietnam pulledFull Metal Jacket and Germany bannedNight of the Living Dead. Finally, Saudi Arabia had Netflix remove an episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj after it criticized the Middle Eastern state, which made international headlines.

Despite having taken the aforementioned content down in its respective countries, Netflix reassures that it doesnt take these censorship demands lightly, saying that it will only do so if the company receives a written government request and cannot, in any circumstance, reach an agreement with local authorities. Where it deems necessary, the streaming service will also actively fight against those demands, as in the case of Brazil withThe First Temptation of Christ, which depicts Jesus as a gay man in a religious satire. Netflix had taken the issue to court, ultimately winning the case in the countrys Supreme Court last month.

In other entertainment news, check out the freshly-releasedThe Invisible Man trailer now.

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Netflix Reveals All Its Government Censorship Incidents Over the Last 5 Years - HYPEBEAST

February 10, 2020 (American Thinker) One of the most worrisome things in America today is that the public square isn't public. Instead, it's owned by tech oligarchs, all of whom hew left politically. For years, Google (and its subsidiary YouTube), Twitter, and Facebook have systematically shut down conservative speech while giving almost unlimited passes to speech coming from the Left.

Twitter has been especially fierce in silencing conservatives, but Facebook has had its moment. Of late,privateFacebook groups are finding their posts censored, even though they're being shared only among members of like-minded communities. Facebook also has a revolting habit of appending to certain links that it doesn't like claims that the link could be false and directing people instead to "reputable" sources such as theNew York Times,the Washington Post,the AP, orReuters.

For this reason, it's noteworthy when social media outletsallowa popular conservative video to remain on their sites. In this case, the video was a re-cut showing highlights from Trump's State of the Union speech, intercut with endlessly repeated footage of a vindictive, petty Pelosi ripping that same speech.

Those who opposed the video, which has been viewed millions of times, claimed that it's a "manipulated video," which violates Facebook's current rules and Twitter's upcoming rules. Both outlets, however,rejected that viewpoint and rightly too. The concept of a dangerously manipulated video arises in the context of "deep fakes" that is, videos so subtly manipulated that people do not realize that the video has been altered.

In this case, it's clear even to the meanest intelligence that the video has been altered to make a point (a good point):

Kevin Jackson made a similar, equally good video:

Sooner or later (with sooner being better), Trump is going to have to address the way in which the social media giants systematically suppress conservative speech. In an ideal world, competition would create competitive sites. However, it's been years now, and none of the competitive attempts have taken off.

The unique status of the tech giants makes them very difficult to challenge in the free market. In many ways, they have become the internet equivalent of the restaurants and hotels that the Civil Rights Act addressed when it passed legislation overriding private property rights and holding that people who own places of "public accommodation" cannot discriminate. Given social media's extraordinary reach and control over communications among members of the public, it's dangerous to allow these tech sites to hold such unlimited power over the content of speech in America.

Published with permission from the American Thinker.

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Conservatives shocked as Facebook, Twitter refuse to censor pro-Trump video - Lifesite

The coronavirus is the greatest crisis to have faced President Xi Jinping since he took power in 2012.

Since the outbreak began in the central city of Wuhan last December, it has killed 565 people and infected more than 28,200. All but two of the deaths were in mainland China. It has forced the government to lock down cities with a population exceeding 60 million and is likely to cut GDP growth this year by at least 0.5 percentage points.

Who is responsible for this catastrophe? Beijing cannot blame it on the United States and the hostile foreign forces it holds responsible for eight months of protest in Hong Kong and helping Tsai Ying-wen to win a second presidential term in Taiwan. No the guilty parties are within China.A bitter war is being waged on the Chinese internet over this issue.

Many believe the government is guilty of a cover-up after the first patient in Wuhan experienced the symptoms of the disease on December 1. On the social platform Douban, many people have written reviews of the television series Chernobyl, about the Soviet nuclear disaster in April 1986. The Soviet government delayed news of the catastrophe and did not report faithfully what had happened. In any era, any country, its the same. Cover everything up, wrote one blogger. That is socialism.

On December 30, Li Wenliang (pictured), a Wuhan doctor, informed fellow doctors in an online chat group that seven patients from a local seafood market had been diagnosed with a SARS-like illness and were quarantined in his hospital. Contaminated animals in the market are the most likely source of the virus.

Li and seven other doctors were visited by city police; they accused them of rumour-mongering and warned them not to discuss the disease in public. Li himself was tested positive for the virus on February 1 and died in the early hours of February 7.

His death caused an outpouring of grief and anger on social media. Wuhan government owes Dr Li Wenliang an apology, said one. We want freedom of speech, said another. Tens of thousands read the comments before the censors deleted them.

If any of us here is fortunate enough to speak up for the public in the future, please make sure you remember tonights anger, said another comment.

Lis death is the most tragic result of a cover-up. On January 2, hospitals in Wuhan accepted 27 patients who had direct exposure to the seafood market. By January 18, the number of infected patients in Wuhan had risen to 62; that day the city government arranged a public banquet with 40,000 families making and sharing food. By then doctors had told the city government that the virus could be spread from human to human.

But it was only on January 22 that the city was quarantined and severe measures put in place. In the weeks before, five million people had left Wuhan to travel all over China and around the world. It is they who have carried the disease across the globe.

Chinese are asking why it took seven weeks from the first case to the public announcement and imposition of drastic measures. The answer is Chinas highly centralised reporting system. The Wuhan government is likely to have reported details of the disease to Beijing; but it could not announce anything or take strong measures without approval.

Was it only Xi himself who could make such a major decision? Did the Prime Minister and Minister of Health have to wait for him?

Many of the bloggers direct their anger at Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang and Hubei governor Wang Xiaodong. During an interview that Zhou gave to state television, one commentor wrote in a live stream: Stop talking. We just want to know when you will resign.

To avoid the censors, bloggers must be ingenious. Some refer to Xi Jinping as Trump. Others describe the police and police stations with characters that are incorrect but have the same sound as the correct ones. This works because most of the censoring is done by computers, which cannot detect wordplay.

In the early days of the crisis, control of the Internet was eased, allowing criticism of the local government. Then this week President Xi said that the government needed to step up propaganda and strengthen online media control to maintain social stability. Many WeChat accounts have been shut down. State news media runs positive stories about how China is defeating the virus and about health workers in the front line.

This epidemic is devastating and figures at the very top of government are implicated in the appalling response. The Chernobyl catastrophe was so horrific that it helped to speed the collapse of the Soviet Union. The question now is what the consequences will be for the Chinese government of this terrible, growing crisis that it has handled so incompetently.

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Censorship, lies and death: China's government under fire - TheArticle

In its 23 years of service, Netflix has removed only nine pieces of content due to government censorship.

In a new report titledEnvironmental Social Governance, the streaming giant revealed that over the years it has received takedown requests from the governments of New Zealand, Vietnam, Germany, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia. The first ever takedown notice came from New Zealand in 2015, but Singapore is by far the most active.

[Read: How to opt out of Netflixs autoplay previews]

Here are the nine titles Netflix removed over the years:

For what its worth, Netflix aims to make as much content as possible available on its platform, but it says itll ultimately comply with removal notices if a country has forbidden the distribution of certain titles.

This is the first time Netflix has revealed the list of titles that have been removed following government pressure, but the company intends to continue disclosing such information in the future. Beginning next year, we will report these takedowns annually, the company writes in the report.

via Axios

Read next: Every c-suite leader needs to be a Chief Empathy Officer

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Here are the 9 titles Netflix purged due to government censorship - The Next Web