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Political Censorship: Facebook Bans NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Cover for `Nudity“
Was it the tame, though morally disgusting picture of National Geographics cover or the political message that occasioned a Facebook ban on the post below saying it violated their `community standards`?
Facebook is notorious for censorship of White nationalist or conservative posts.
Paul Fromm
Director
Canadian Association for Free Expression
The planned genocide of Europeans through mass alien immigration and race mixing
A top lawmaker from the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was blocked from Twitter and Facebook on Monday after slamming the Cologne police for sending a New Year’s tweet in Arabic. The incident caused the AfD to lash out further and criticize censorship as a controversial new German social media law known as NetzDG went into effect January 1 in a bid to clamp down on online hate speech.
The Cologne police tweeted New Year’s greetings and linked to information on celebrating safely in a series of messages in German and other languages, including Arabic. Cologne was the scene two years ago of mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in which most of the suspects were described as young men of North African and Arab origin.
The tweet was later deleted after Twitter froze von Storch’s account and informed her she had violated hate speech rules. Her account was shut down for 12 hours. The Cologne police said on Monday that they had filed a criminal complaint against von Storch for hate speech.
Von Storch undeterred
The lawmaker then upped the ante, writing a sarcastic post once her account was reopened. She also announced that her Facebook account had been “censored” due to a hate speech complaint.
“Facebook has also censored me. That is the end of the constitutional state,” she wrote, showing the message she received from the social media giant.
Due to the Cologne police criminal complaint, she wrote that state prosecutors would have to investigate lifting her parliamentary immunity, then indict her and go through a court process to finally convict her.
“My knees are shaking,” she wrote of such an unlikely scenario. “But Facebook has already issued a judgment.”
New year, controversial new law
The AfD has branded NetzDG as a “censorship law.” But they are not alone in criticizing a law that requires companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to remove content that advocates violence or slander or face fines of up to 50 million euros ($53 million).
Internet activists and journalist organizations have also raised objections, not least because the government has deliberately left the task of deleting content or blocking users to the internet platforms themselves, rather than having courts make decisions.
The AfD appears to want to make the new social media law a major issue by testing boundaries and provoking a response from social media companies and law enforcement authorities.
AfD parliamentary group leader Alice Weidel wrote on Facebook and Twitter defending her party colleague and lamenting what she called the “censorship law,” while sharing the text of von Storch’s deleted tweet and repeating her complaints, while referring to “migrant mobs” instead of Muslim men specifically.
Cologne police later said on Tuesday that they had received criminal complaints against Weidel
“[A]fter matching user names to posts on social-media profiles, [AirBNB] canceled dozens of reservations made by self-identified Nazis who were using its app to find rooms in Charlottesville, where they were heading to protest the removal of a Confederate statue,” reports Bloomberg News.
Uber is now telling drivers “they don’t have to pick up racists;” PayPal is revoking payment services to “sites that promote racial intolerance,” reports Bloomberg; and “Discover Financial Services, the credit card company, said this week that it was ending its agreements with hate groups.”
These corporate thought police will be remembered. A New Order will find ways to punish them for corporate irresponsibility and wholesale violation of White People’s rights.
Tags: Airbnb, Apple, Facebook, intolerance, KKK, Ministry of Truth, neo-nazis, PayPal, progressivism, racism, social justice, thought police, Utopia
(Natural News) A new “cyber dark ages” has descended upon the internet as Apple, AirBNB, Facebook and other tech companies have decided that Neo-Nazis must be banned from everything. Tech companies are the new “thought police” of America.
“[A]fter matching user names to posts on social-media profiles, [AirBNB] canceled dozens of reservations made by self-identified Nazis who were using its app to find rooms in Charlottesville, where they were heading to protest the removal of a Confederate statue,” reports Bloomberg News.
Uber is now telling drivers “they don’t have to pick up racists;” PayPal is revoking payment services to “sites that promote racial intolerance,” reports Bloomberg; and “Discover Financial Services, the credit card company, said this week that it was ending its agreements with hate groups.”
Neo-Nazis are offensive to every reasonable person, of course, but these actions beg the question: Do “offensive” people no longer have the right to participate in the infrastructure of modern society? And who decides, exactly, which people qualify as the most offensive and deserving of being cut off from the very society in which they live?
That’s why today, I’m calling for all municipal water services to be cut off from all racists, Neo-Nazis and KKK members. Heck, why stop there? Why should electricity services be provided to Nazi sympathizers? Shouldn’t local power companies cut off their electricity, too?
In fact, come to think of it, why stop at just Neo-Nazis? I think that in the name of “inclusiveness” and “tolerance,” water and power services should be completely cut off from those who do not worship transgenderism, praise Black Lives Matter and donate 10% of their paychecks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And Amazon should cut off Prime memberships to Neo-Nazis, too, just to make sure they can’t watch free movies and stuff. (Come to think of it, how many Nazi supporters are also Netflix members? Gosh, Netflix should really cut off those sh#theads and make sure they can’t watch movies.)
In fact, let’s just be honest here. All Republicans, conservatives, Trump supporters and gun owners should frankly be denied the right to oxygen. Breathing should be criminalized for those who do not wholeheartedly agree with toppling all “offensive” statues, defacing Mount Rushmore, worshiping Obama and nullifying the 2016 president election. In fact, if you aren’t gay, transgender, lesbian, queer or “gender fluid,” you really have no right to exist at all. I mean, that’s where this is going, right?
Sewer services should also be cut off from all Trump supporters so they have to live in their own sh#t. And all gas stations should deny gasoline to anyone whose vehicle doesn’t carry a rainbow pride bumper sticker. In fact, let’s just ban use of all highways to anyone who isn’t a Leftist. Why should conservatives have the right to use public roads paid by “progressive” taxpayers, anyway?
F#ck it, let’s go all out here. All counties across America should deny “racists” the right to own private property. Why should “intolerant” people be allowed the right to own a home, anyway? After all, they might use private homes to hold “KKK” meetings or Bible study or something. This has got to stop! I say all county clerks should go through all the photographs of people who participated in Neo-Nazi rallies of any kind, and then seize their property. Hell yeah. That should finally achieve “peace” for our nation, right?
But then, why stop there? Let’s just burn down all the white neighborhoods just to be sure we get all the “racists.” Ban all credit cards for conservatives, then ban their cash, too, just to make sure they can’t actually buy anything. While we’re at it, let’s all just deny white people any right to work at any job whatsoever, making sure they can’t earn the cash to buy cars that they might use as ramming vehicles. And then deny food stamps for all White people, too, because why should obvious racists have the right to eat?
Oh, come to think of it, we should also ban white people from owning all cars, because those are weapons, too. From now on, all cars can only be driven by people of color. That’s how we finally achieve fairness, justice and equality, you see.
Once we ban all the water, electricity, oxygen, food, private property, internet access, money and jobs of all White people — and burn down their homes, post-birth abort their babies and silence their voices — we can all finally live in peace and tranquility in our new society rooted in “justice” and “equality.” Right? …Right?
Yep, all this will finally make America “tolerant” again, complete with all the imagined diversity that comes from totalitarianism and stupidity pretending to be “progressivism.” Thank God AirBNB, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and PayPal are leading the way to the new society of tolerance and peace, because for a minute there, I was afraid things were getting out of hand.
BERLIN — Social media companies operating in Germany face fines of as much as $57 million if they do not delete illegal, racist or slanderous comments and posts within 24 hours under a law passed on Friday.
The law reinforces Germany’s position as one of the most aggressive countries in the Western world at forcing companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter to crack down on hate speech and other extremist messaging on their digital platforms.
But the new rules have also raised questions about freedom of expression. Digital and human rights groups, as well as the companies themselves, opposed the law on the grounds that it placed limits on individuals’ right to free expression. Critics also said the legislation shifted the burden of responsibility to the providers from the courts, leading to last-minute changes in its wording.
Technology companies and free speech advocates argue that there is a fine line between policy makers’ views on hate speech and what is considered legitimate freedom of expression, and social networks say they do not want to be forced to censor those who use their services. Silicon Valley companies also deny that they are failing to meet countries’ demands to remove suspected hate speech online.
“With this law, we put an end to the verbal law of the jungle on the internet and protect the freedom of expression for all,” Mr. Maas said. “We are ensuring that everyone can express their opinion freely, without being insulted or threatened.”
“That is not a limitation, but a prerequisite for freedom of expression,” he continued.
The law will take effect in October, less than a month after nationwide elections, and will apply to social media sites with more than two million users in Germany.
It will require companies including Facebook, Twitter and Google, which owns YouTube, to remove any content that is illegal in Germany — such as Nazi symbols or Holocaust denial — within 24 hours of it being brought to their attention.
The law allows for up to seven days for the companies to decide on content that has been flagged as offensive, but that may not be clearly defamatory or inciting violence. Companies that persistently fail to address complaints by taking too long to delete illegal content face fines that start at 5 million euros, or $5.7 million, and could rise to as much as €50 million.
Every six months, companies will have to publicly report the number of complaints they have received and how they have handled them.
In Germany, which has some of the most stringent anti-hate speech laws in the Western world, a study published this year found that Facebook and Twitter had failed to meet a national target of removing 70 percent of online hate speech within 24 hours of being alerted to its presence.
The report noted that while the two companies eventually erased almost all of the illegal hate speech, Facebook managed to remove only 39 percent within 24 hours, as demanded by the German authorities. Twitter met that deadline in 1 percent of instances. YouTube fared significantly better, removing 90 percent of flagged content within a day of being notified.
Facebook said on Friday that the company shared the German government’s goal of fighting hate speech and had “been working hard” to resolve the issue of illegal content. The company announced in May that it would nearly double, to 7,500, the number of employees worldwide devoted to clearing its site of flagged postings. It was also trying to improve the processes by which users could report problems, a spokesman said.
Twitter declined to comment, while Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The standoff between tech companies and politicians is most acute in Europe, where freedom of expression rights are less comprehensive than in the United States, and where policy makers have often bristled at Silicon Valley’s dominance of people’s digital lives.
But advocacy groups in Europe have raised concerns over the new German law.
Mirko Hohmann and Alexander Pirant of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin criticized the legislation as “misguided” for placing too much responsibility for deciding what constitutes unlawful content in the hands of social media providers.
“Setting the rules of the digital public square, including the identification of what is lawful and what is not, should not be left to private companies,” they wrote.
Even in the United States, Facebook and Google also have taken steps to limit the spread of extremist messaging online, and to prevent “fake news” from circulating. That includes using artificial intelligence to remove potentially extremist material automatically and banning news sites believed to spread fake or misleading reports from making money through the companies’ digital advertising platforms.
‘It only takes a 30 second Google search to confirm why most of these individuals and groups are a problem in relation to hate speech,’ Warman said. ‘Hate speech has no place in Canada.’”
Notice, the victims got no trial or right of response. And what is ‘hate spech’? Why it’s speech some privileged minority hates.
Warman, who has long battled far right websites, had sent a list of suspected Canadian anti-Muslim pages to Facebook following the Quebec City mosque attack that left six worshippers dead.
Facebook has ‘taken action on those that qualify as hate speech,’ a company spokeswoman said Tuesday. While some of the pages were removed, others remained up but specific posts were deleted.
Six of the 22 Facebook links in Warman’s complaint were no longer online, among them the Cultural Action Party, Canadians Against Justin Trudeau and Soldiers of Odin – Ontario South.
‘The reason I forwarded the list of Facebook profiles to their management in Canada is because they had been reported to me with concerns about hate speech,’ Warman said.” [Who reported them? Was Warman’s complaint written on his own time?]
“According to Facebook’s community standards code, the company removes content that ‘directly attacks’ people based on their race, religion, sex or sexual orientation.
‘Organizations and people dedicated to promoting hatred against these protected groups are not allowed a presence on Facebook,’ it reads. ‘As with all of our standards, we rely on our community to report this content to us.’ But most of the links Warman had complained about were not taken down, despite having provocative names such as the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam and the Canadian Anti Islamic Force.
Stewart Bell | February 21, 2017 | Last Updated: Feb 21 12:10 PM ET
More from Stewart Bell | @StewartBellNP
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The couple, who live in the German town of Vierkirchen, stood accused of inciting hatred toward migrants via the Facebook group that the pair had created called the “Anti-refugee movement” (AFB). The group is said, by the court, to have been a clear incitement against migrants and as a result both 27-year-old Peter M. and his 26-year-old wife Melanie M. were found guilty of hate speech, Merkur reports.
The statements on the Facebook group did not seem to contain anything overtly nationalistic or Nazi-inspired, but rather expressed deep concern about the situation in Germany relating to mass migration.
According to the court, the page, which has been taken down, in its first post stated: “The war and economic refugees are flooding our country. They bring terror, fear, sorrow. They rape our women and put our children at risk,” which along with a German flag as the groups profile photo, was enough to bring the couple to court for hate speech.
The group amassed around 900 followers in the two months that it was active. The beginning of the end for the group happened when a user reported the page to Facebook, who have been upfront about cooperating with the German government incensoring speech they deem as critical of migrants.
The Facebook user who reported the page took a further step and reported it to their local police station in Lübeck whereupon police were able to ascertain that the administrator of the page lived in Vierkirchen and handed the investigation over to the local police.
At the trial, Peter M. defended his remarks online and said: “One can not even express a critical opinion of refugees without getting labelled as a Nazi. I wanted to create a discussion forum where you can speak your mind about refugees.” Peter M. talked about how, in his role as an administrator of the group, he would weed out any pro-Nazi or radical remarks and delete such posts but since Facebook had deleted the page he couldn’t present the evidence to the court.
The judge in the case was unforgiving in his verdict on the site saying that “the description of the group is a series of generalisations with a clear right-wing background”. After sentencing Peter M. to a nine month suspended prison sentence and his wife to a fine of €1,200 the judge said: “I hope you understand the seriousness of the situation. If you sit in front of me again, you will end up in jail.”
The case bears similarities to other cases where Facebook and the German government have shut down pages critical of migrants. A 16-year-old girl who complained that she feared for her safety in a video posted to Facebook had her page taken down, and police in Berlin raided the apartments of several Facebook and Twitter users for their anti-migrant comments online. PEGIDA leader Lutz Bachmann was also taken to court over comments he made on Facebook and found guilty of hate speech.
by Douglas Murray
February 5, 2016 at 5:00 am
Facebook’s War on Freedom of Speech
It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.
Now one of the most sinister stories of the past year was hardly even reported. In September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at a UN development summit in New York. As they sat down, Chancellor Merkel’s microphone, still on,recorded Merkel asking Zuckerberg what could be done to stop anti-immigration postings being written on Facebook. She asked if it was something he was working on, and he assured her it was.
At the time, perhaps the most revealing aspect of this exchange was that the German Chancellor — at the very moment that her country was going through one of the most significant events in its post-war history — should have been spending any time worrying about how to stop public dislike of her policies being vented on social media. But now it appears that the discussion yielded consequential results.
Last month, Facebook launched what it called an “Initiative for civil courage online,” the aim of which, it claims, is to remove “hate speech” from Facebook — specifically by removing comments that “promote xenophobia.” Facebook is working with a unit of the publisher Bertelsmann, which aims to identify and then erase “racist” posts from the site. The work is intended particularly to focus on Facebook users in Germany. At the launch of the new initiative, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, explained that, “Hate speech has no place in our society — not even on the internet.” She went to say that, “Facebook is not a place for the dissemination of hate speech or incitement to violence.” Of course, Facebook can do what it likes on its own website. What is troubling is what this organization of effort and muddled thinking reveals about what is going on in Europe.
The mass movement of millions of people — from across Africa, the Middle East and further afield — into Europe has happened in record time and is a huge event in its history. As events in Paris, Cologne and Sweden have shown, it is also by no means a series of events only with positive connotations.
As well as being fearful of the security implications of allowing in millions of people whose identities, beliefs and intentions are unknown and — in such large numbers — unknowable, many Europeans are deeply concerned that this movement heralds an irreversible alteration in the fabric of their society. Many Europeans do not want to become a melting pot for the Middle East and Africa, but want to retain something of their own identities and traditions. Apparently, it is not just a minority who feel concern about this. Poll after poll shows a significant majority of the public in each and every European country opposed to immigration at anything like the current rate.
The sinister thing about what Facebook is doing is that it is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might consider racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”
And it just so happens to turn out that, lo and behold, this idea of “racist” speech appears to include anything critical of the EU’s current catastrophic immigration policy.
By deciding that “xenophobic” comment in reaction to the crisis is also “racist,” Facebook has made the view of the majority of the European people (who, it must be stressed, are opposed to Chancellor Merkel’s policies) into “racist” views, and so is condemning the majority of Europeans as “racist.” This is a policy that will do its part in pushing Europe into a disastrous future.
Because even if some of the speech Facebook is so scared of is in some way “xenophobic,” there are deep questions as to why such speech should be banned. In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations, and only violence is left. Weimar Germany — to give just one example — was replete with hate-speech laws intended to limit speech the state did not like. These laws did nothing whatsoever to limit the rise of extremism; it only made martyrs out of those it pursued, and persuaded an even larger number of people that the time for talking was over.
The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week, reports from the Netherlands told of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on Twitter and other social media.
In this toxic mix, Facebook has now — knowingly or unknowingly — played its part. The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.
Internet giants Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have pledged to work harder to tackle online hatred after agreeing a deal with a leading antisemitism watchdog.
The companies endorsed a series of pledges on Monday following talks in California with the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism.
Described by one insider as a “game-changing” development, the agreement will see the companies increase efforts to stop the proliferation of racist and abusive comments on their sites.
The technology firms are all members of the ICCA’s working group on cyber hate. The Anti-Defamation League is a co-convenor of the group. The taskforce has been leading collaborative efforts with politicians, lawyers and the business world to force racism and hatred from the web.
Digital help
An IT professional with over 30 years experience has launched an initiative to fight antisemitism and anti-Israel activity on social media.
The DJ First scheme offers free training courses for members of the community on how to use social networks like Twitter.
Gary Simon, who set up the project, explained that social media could be harnessed as a weapon against antisemitism but the community was suffering from a knowledge gap in the area.
Under the agreement, the companies have committed to introduce more user-friendly reporting systems, and will respond quicker to allegations of abuse. They will also enforce tougher sanctions against those who post abusive messages.
More work will now take place between the companies to develop further ideas on tackling online hate speech and create educational materials.
An ICCA spokeswoman in London said: “This is very significant. It’s the first time solutions have been found. If we have the big players then the others will follow. It’s not too much to say it’s a game-changer.”
British members of the working group travelled to Los Angeles last week to strike the deal. Labour MP John Mann joined Superintendent Paul Giannasi, of the Ministry of Justice’s Hate Crime Unit, and Mike Whine of the Community Security Trust, in California.
Mr Mann, ICAA chair, said: “We welcome this development and will continue to work with the industry, governments and parliaments to implement these best practices and work against the spread of hatred on the internet.”
Mr Whine said: “The internet has facilitated and encouraged the spread of hate speech. The impact is of mounting concern to governments, their criminal justice agencies and civil society alike.
“These new agreed best practices are a significant step forward. They follow five meetings in Silicon Valley which CST helped prepare and facilitate.”
