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UK MPs have joined the call for President Trump to be censored from social media platforms due to his incendiary tweets about the US anti-racism protests currently underway.

Despite the fact that the statement in question where Trump deployed the historically racist phrase when the looting starts, the shooting starts has been widely broadcast by TV networks and newspapers across the world, MPs who were grilling reps from Twitter and Facebook at the latest online harms parliamentary committee meeting yesterday were concerned about the words being allowed to remain on Twitter and Facebook.

Following Labour MP Kevin Brennans spluttering incredulity over head of product policy and counterterrorism at Facebook Monika Bickerts claim not to have seen the the New York Times letter penned by disgruntled Facebook employees, Bickert responded that the post had been allowed to remain up because its the platforms policy to allow discussion of government use of force.

We think if governments are talking about using force, people should be able to discuss that [] frequently, there could be a safety reason that people would want to know what governments are planning, saidBickert.

Twitter which allowed the tweet to remain up but amended it with a notice and blocked the retweet function was probed on the same issue. Now that youre imposing scrutiny on President Trumps tweets, are you a platform, a publisher? asked Tory MP and DCMS chair Julian Knight. Or do you recognise you are what many people believe you are, which is a hybrid of both?

I totally agree with the premise. I dont think the traditional dichotomy really works anymore, replied Nick Pickles, director of public policy strategy at Twitter, saying the platform is now seeking to provide extra context for tweets (to be supplied by journalists, experts, academics, third parties).

Has there been any discussion at all within your organisation of suspending President Trumps Twitter account? Knight asked.

Pickles clarified that the Twitter decision on Trumps account was taken because the public debate about that tweet is important to protect.

In a botched attempt at a gotcha moment, SNP MP John Nicolson described an account on Twitter that posts exactly the same words as Trump, declaring triumphantly you suspended his account for violating your standards.

I think this is the system working as intended [] In both cases, we said the tweet broke our rules, replied Pickles, noting that according to a public policy the firm announced last year, that if an account breaks the rules but meets the criteria of being verified, having more than 100,000 followers and being operated by a public figure, then we may take the option, that in the public interest, we want that tweet to be available. In the case of the Trump tweet, he said: One of those accounts meets those criteria; one of those doesnt.

MPs also returned to their favourite internet bugbears: online anonymity and encryption. Its the opinion of some MPs that anonymity online couldnt possibly serve any useful purpose.

Pickles offered two examples of where anonymity would actually be pretty useful: in both the current political moment in the US (where people have testified on Twitter about the threat to their career of publicly being a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement online) and Hong Kong, where for obvious reasons protesters may want to shield their identity. Other examples, of course, include people who are posting in authoritarian countries, those seeking to avoid the attention of stalker or abusive ex-partners, whistleblowers, or parody accounts whose primary purpose is humour.

But the MPs present appeared to remain stubbornly impervious to the idea that there could be any reason for wanting to be anonymous online other than being a troll, demanding to know why Twitter had not carried out research looking at whether more factually inaccurate information was disseminated by anonymous accounts.

I think one of the problems is that people are focused on anonymous accounts as a disproportionate part of the problem than is actually the case, said Pickles. He noted that when South Korea trialled removing anonymity from the internet, it didnt find a connection between anonymity and abuse.

Asked whether Facebook still intends to introduce encryption across all user communications across its platforms, Bickert said: We are still planning to implement end to end encryption, but were still in the investigative stages at this point.

Yvette Cooper took up the charge, demanding to know how child sexual abuse material would be caught by Facebook if everything was encrypted. How can it be safe if nobody can see the content? asked Cooper.

The Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, featuring the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, is reportedly in the midst of staging a legal challenge against Facebook over its plans for encryption, ostensibly for the protection of children.

Continued here:
MPs grill Twitter and Facebook over Trump censorship issue - NS Tech

A GOP congressional candidate is accusingFacebook of "censorship" after the social media giant took down acampaign video that shows herholdingan assault rifleand warningAntifa to "stay the hell out of northwest Georgia."

Marjorie Greene, abusinesswoman running inGeorgia's 14th District, posted the ad on Facebook Tuesday. By Thursday, Facebook told her campaign the videowascoming down because it violated companypolicies against promoting the use of firearms.

The video is still running on Twitter, and Greene has bought air time to run the ad on broadcast and cable TV in advance of the Tuesday primary.

Greene said the decision by Facebook reeks of adouble-standard.

"Facebook lets Antifaorganize terrorist attacks on America and allows videos of innocent Americans being brutally attacked, butpulls my post down," she told Fox News."America is a country of law and order -- not anarchy. Telling Antifa thugs to stay out of northwest Georgia is not a violation of Facebook."

GOP CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE BLOWS UP 'SOCIALISM' IN NEW TV AD

Greene's Facebookad reached more than 2 million people before being deleted.

"Big Tech censorship of conservatives must end," Greene said.

Facebook stands by itsdecision.

"We removed this ad, which advocates the use of deadly weapons against a clearly defined group of people, for violating our policies against inciting violence," Facebook said in a statement to Fox News.

Facebook told Greene's campaign that she can't have ads "promoting the brandishing of firearms," according to an email reviewed by Fox News.

During the ad, Greene takes on Antifa, the anti-fascist protest movement that the Trump administration contends isa domesticterrorist groupresponsible for the violent uprisings against police in recent days.

CONSERVATIVE GROUPS PUSH DIVERSE SLATE OF GOP HOUSE CANDIDATES IN EFFORT TO TAKE BACK LOST GROUND

Tens of thousands of peaceful protesters have demonstrated against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd's death after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the unarmed man'sneck for more than eight minutes. But an organized fringe element has sought to hijack the protests, destroy property andunleash violence, government officials say.

In her ad, Greene is armed with an AR-15 on the front porch of a local Georgia business when she issued her warning to Antifa activists.

"You wont burn our churches, loot our businessesor destroy our homes," she declares.

REPUBLICAN REVENGE: RECORD GOP FIELD FORMS, ON 2020 MISSION TO TAKE DOWN 'SOCIALISTS'

This isn't the first time Greene has campaigned with firearms. In her first ad, she literally blows up "socialism." Facebook didn't pull that ad.

Greene faces a crowded primary race against John Cowan, a neurosurgeon;Clayton Fuller, a former prosecutor;John Barge, former state schools superintendent; and Ben Bullock, an Air Force veteran.Also runningin the GOP primary areKevin Cooke, a state representative;Bill Hembree, a former member of the Georgia legislature; Andy Gunther andMatt Laughridge.

Read more:
Facebook pulls ad from gun-toting Georgia candidate taking on Antifa: 'Big Tech censorship of conservative... - Fox News

Having criticized Twitter for poking the bear, Facebook seems to be adopting a more nuanced approach to policing its platform.

Twitters decision to censor President Trump was an astounding mistake. Of course nobody, no matter how powerful, should be exempt from its policies, but if youre going to single out one of the most powerful people in the world, you had better make sure you have all your bases covered. Twitter didnt.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg recognised Twitters mistake immediately and announced during an interview with Fox News that Facebook shouldnt be the arbiter of truth of everything people say online. Even his choice of news outlet was telling, as Fox seems to be the only one not despised by Trump. Zuckerberg was effectively saying leave us out of this.

Twitter boss Jack Dorsey responded directly with the following tweet thread, which at first attempted to isolate the decision to censor Trump to him alone, but then proceeded to talk in the first person plural.

Within a couple of days Zuckerberg posted further clarification of his position on, of course, Facebook. He noted the current violent public response to a man dying in US police custody served as a further reminder of the importance of getting these decisions right.

Unlike Twitter, we do not have a policy of putting a warning in front of posts that may incite violence because we believe that if a post incites violence, it should be removed regardless of whether it is newsworthy, even if it comes from a politician, wrote Zuckerberg. We have been in touch with the White House today to explain these policies as well.

From that post we can see that Zuckerberg is still in favour of censorship, but sets the bar higher than Twitter and doesnt see the point in half measures. Worryingly for Zuckerberg, many Facebook employees have taken to Twitter to voice their displeasure at this policy, apparently demanding Facebook does censor the President.

Its worth reflecting on the two forms of censorship Twitter has imposed on Trump. The first was simply to fact-check a claim he made about postal voting, which contained a hyperlink to a statement on Twitter saying his claim was unsubstantiated according to select US media consistently hostile to Trump.

The second superimposed a warning label over the top of a Trump tweet which promised repercussions for rioting. The label reads: This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the publics interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. Note the capitalization of Twitter Rules and the clear admission that Twitter considers itself the arbiter of what is in the public interest. Clicking on the label reveals Trumps hidden tweet, which features the phrase when the looting starts, the shooting starts.

That was apparently the bit that was interpreted as glorifying violence, and yet a subsequent Trump tweet, using exactly the same phrase, has not been subject to any censorious action by Twitter. That discrepancy alone (not to mention the fact that the labels dont survive the embedding process) illustrates the impossible position Twitter has put itself in. There are presumably millions of other examples of borderline glorifications of violence, let alone direct threats, that it has also let pass. Such inconsistent censoring can easily be viewed as simple bias, seeking to tip the scales of public conversation in your favour.

For many people censorship is a simple matter of harm reduction. Why would anyone want to allow speech that could cause harm? The mistake they make is to view harm as an objective, absolute concept on which there is unilateral consensus. As Zuckerbergs post shows, the perception of harm is often highly subjective, and the threshold at which to censor harmful speech is entirely arbitrary.

There is clearly a lot of demand for extensive policing of internet speech nonetheless, but social media companies have to resist it if they want to be able to claim theyre impartial. Theres just no way to keep bias out of the censorship process. If they dont, they risk being designated as publishers and thus legally responsible for every piece of content they host. This would be calamitous for their entire business model, which makes it all the more baffling that Dorsey would so openly risk such an outcome.

Read the rest here:
Facebook attempts to walk the tightrope on censorship - Telecoms.com

Its official: criticising Black Lives Matter is now a sackable offence, even here in the British Isles, thousands of miles away from the social conflict currently embroiling the US. As protesters again fill the streets of a rainy London on Saturday, as part of a now internationalised backlash against the brutal police killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, those who criticise them do so at their peril as two men have recently found out.

Stu Peters, a presenter on Manx Radio, has been suspended, pending an investigation, for an on-air exchange with a black caller. He said nothing racist, you can read the transcriptfor yourself. What he did was rubbish the idea of white privilege: I've had no more privilege in my life than you have. And he questioned the wisdom of staging a protest on the Isle of Man against a killing in Minnesota: You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn't make any sense to me.

For this, he has been taken off air. ManxRadio has even referred the exchange to the Isle of Mans Communications Commission to assess whether any broadcast codes have been broken. And for what? He took issue with the idea that skin colour confers privilege, regardless of any other consideration: a mad ideology whose adherents will actuallyreadily say that white homeless people enjoy white privilege.

And he wondered out loud if a protest against US cops on a small island in the Irish Sea is, well, a bit pointless. If Peters has broken any code it is a very new and unwritten one, and hes not the only person to fall foul of it in recent days. MartinShipton, chief reporter for the Western Mail, has been asked to step down as a judge of the Wales Book of the Year competition over some tweets he posted about the BLM protests in Cardiff. He said they were exercises in virtue-signalling and expressed concern about the effect they might have on the spread of Covid-19. He also got into some robust exchanges with people who told him that, as an old white man, he should just shut up.

How did we get here? In the space of just a few days, Black Lives Matter, its tenets and adherents have become almost unquestionable. No one worth wasting breath on disagrees with the literal message of the movement. But those who dare criticise a lot of the identitarian ideological guff that unfortunately accompanies the movement now risk being treated as heretics. Even criticising these mass gatherings for breaking lockdown remember when sitting too closely on a beach was a scoldable offence? is treated as alarming evidence of non-conformity or perhaps even racism.

This is all a neat demonstration that censorship is not exclusively about state clampdowns. The suspension of Peters and the sacking of Shipton are examples of what John Stuart Mill called the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them. If expressing an opinion, even one as mild as I support the sentiment, but Im not sure these protests are a great idea, the resulting backlashcan cost you your job or social status.

But this is also profoundly worrying not only for free speech but also for the quality of our discussion about racism and how to defeat it. We are being compelled to have a conversation about race, but one in which any dissent from the most extreme and absurd positions such as that Western society is still racist to the core and that dirt-poor white folk benefit from it, even if they dont realise it are treated as suspect. This is a recipe for censorship, division and neverending culture war and nothing else.

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The march of progressive censorship - Spectator.co.uk

"The Order would circumvent the role of Congress and of the courts in enacting and interpreting [Section 230] ...and purport to empower multiple government agencies to pass judgment on companies content moderation practices," its lawsuit states. "The Order clouds the legal landscape in which the hosts of third-party content operate and puts them all on notice that content moderation decisions with which the government disagrees could produce penalties and retributive actions, including stripping them of Section 230s protections."

So yeah, here we go with Section 230 (again). If you're unfamiliar, Section 230 is what came out of the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, an amendment to update the Communications Act of 1934 for the internet era. Or rather, Ye Olde Internet Era, as 230 hails from 1996. It has a strange and storied history thats deeply entangled with a certain set of puritanical family values, entrenched in forcing broadcast art and communications to adhere to a specific worldview. It was known as The Communications Decency Act of 1996, which had hoped to censor porn on the internet but instead ended up protecting free speech online. Because it turns out that sexual expression is protected speech. Lets hope someone tells Facebook and Tumblr.

Anyway. Section 230 basically makes it so that platforms like Twitter and Facebook can have user-generated content (what we say on their platforms) without the companies getting hosed by a range of laws that would make them legally responsible for what we say and do. So if we say something stupid, and someone wants to sue, that's on us. Section 230 is such a surprisingly robust, pro-free speech thing that it is pretty much universally regarded as a core protection of free speech on the internet.

Pool via Getty Images

The "Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship" is quite a twisty bit of doublespeak in that regard. Yet what it does -- or vaguely intends to do -- is pretty chilling.

The order wants the FCC -- currently run by the guy who killed net neutrality, Ajit Pai -- to come up with regulations that stop section 230's protections for internet platforms' liability for what's posted there. "In addition," explained Forbes, "the order also directs the FTC to consider taking action in cases of complaints received by the White House of political bias on social media, and then to take action for deceptive acts or practices in such cases. The order also asks the FTC to consider complaints against Twitter as violations of the law."

Further, there are directives for the Attorney General to seek regulation and enforcement against online platforms at the state level and with federal legislation.

The order is being described, dismissively, as being so vague as to be ridiculous. Trump's executive order on social media is a silly distraction from a serious debate, said Sarah Miller, Executive Director of the Economic Liberties Project. This executive order is basically a request to independent agencies, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, to act in some vague manner. The President cannot single-handedly change a law, he cannot order independent agencies to act, and his executive order reflects that.

Miller is someone I usually agree with, but definitely not on this. I think this minimizing stance, and articles saying "Forget Trumps Executive Order" ("Trumps executive order may not do much") are pushing some dangerous thinking. Or, they are perspectives coming from people who were in no way affected by FOSTA-SESTA.

Because one horrible thing we learned about freedom of speech and internet companies is that it doesn't matter if the marching orders coming from lawmakers and the White House look like they wont do much. FOSTA was vague and sought to neuter Section 230, too. What matters is how companies like Facebook et al decide to change their policies and guess how to implement whatever will make them safe from legal consequences.

FOSTA, as you may recall, was implemented as overbroad, compulsory censorship, ultimately encouraging discriminatory practices against sex workers (or anyone perceived to be a sex worker) everywhere. Some companies, like Facebook who lobbied for FOSTA, acted on the order before its ink dried, as it was (apparently) eagerly seeking a way to punish and exclude users whose sexual morality and professions as performers were not in line with its puritanical values.

Sexual speech is protected speech, and yet companies like Facebook and Tumblr leveraged the similarly vague FOSTA to aggressively censor users who even just talked about sex. It gave bad actors like Facebook the juice to use its "Sexual Solicitation" policy to ban "sexual slang," "sex chat or conversations," "mentioning sexual roles, sexual preference, commonly sexualized areas of the body" and more.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images

I like to imagine where we might be if these companies had treated hate groups, Holocauset deniers, and violent extremists with the same zeal for censorship and eradication from platforms, had given them no place to organize and recruit, or to plan and network. I imagine this because it makes me very mad, and it shows me very clearly why these vague White House directives affecting online speech are harmful to both the internet and democratic society.

FOSTA forced countless communities out of places where they once could participate with society, and it stifled speech in ways we have yet to fully comprehend. Tumblr's censorship of gender expression communities and the resultant exodus is just one terrible example. People died in FOSTAs wake because of the ways it was interpreted and implemented.

To characterize the "Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship" as just another of the Mad Kings follies is to ignore the disastrous previous lessons at our own peril. We must accept that everyone is going to be a bad actor and act accordingly. Companies like Facebook and toadies like Ajait Pai are proven bad actors. FOSTA, the last vague order to target Section 230, traded sex for Nazis. FOSTA killed the internet we loved. We must never ever forget that most internet companies and startups embraced it.

This is especially true in a moment of extreme change, and doubly so in one where the fire of accountability lights our path to survival.

Read more here:
The Trojan Horse in Trumps anti-Twitter executive order - Engadget