Facebook and its Open War on Independent Media

[image: 21stcenturywire.com]

(The Real Agenda News) Facebook excuses its censorship on a plea to “end disinformation” and “sensationalism” on the internet.

It will not be enough to have a large audience or be registered as a medium, Facebook wants to measure the trust that the media possess to prioritize their content on the social network.

As of Friday, more than 2 billion active service profiles will see 4% of content generated by professional pages instead of the current 5% in Facebook’s latest attempt to control what information people have access to and what information they are banned from seeing.

Starting next week, users will have a relevant role when it comes to choosing which media are the ones with the most preponderance, Facebook claims.

The company will ask you how much you trust a medium, with an emphasis on local media and the sources used.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the first changes to give more relevance to what was published by friends and family at the expense of the official pages of brands and media:

“Following the 2018 goal, we want to make sure that time on Facebook is a time well spent,” said Zuckerberg.

In a new message on his wall he explains that he is obsessed with quality information.

“There is too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world,” he points out as support for a decision that moves the waves in which the media live a little more.

“Social networks allow information to be disseminated faster than ever, but if we do not confront these problems we will end up expanding them,” he says.

The change not only affects media pages, but also the links that particular users put on their wall.

Just as Google does when pondering the value of a medium or page to make it appear before one domain or another, the so-called Google Rank, Facebook will create its own rating system to give more visibility, or less, depending on the reliability.

As in the case of Google, the quantities and ingredients are not provided to discover their secret sauce, as they like to call success formulas in Silicon Valley.

That is perhaps because that is how Facebook, Google and other social media manage to openly censor accounts and alternative media publications.

According to the calculations of the founder, the amount of news will decrease to 20%.

In the last year, the relationship between the media and Facebook has become blurred, especially at the political level, where they have been accused of having a bias in favor of both Republicans and Democrats.

Facebook maintains that this change and its weighting model will be based on objective data, but the size of the media or its political bias will not be taken into account.

Facebook claims that the decision to delegate to the community aims to provide objectivity to the decision:

“We have decided that it is the users who decide broadly what is the most objective”.

The director emphasizes that they will not show the results of the surveys, because it would not give a real version of the whole process.

There are several points that will have weight in this valuation system: the title, who writes it, who speaks and so on.

The post Facebook and its Open War on Independent Media appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Popular ‘God’ Facebook Page Banned for Post About US Spending Too Much on War

Facebook’s notorious censorship — which has included takedowns of iconic images like the Vietnam War’s ‘Napalm Girl’ to the arrest of Rosa Parks to a photograph of a classical statue of Venus — reached a whole other level of absurd recently, when the platform suspended God’s account.

God, a religious satire profile, had the nerve to write a post critical of spending priorities of the bellicose United States, stating:

“Dear Americans:

Stop making your military so damn huge and give people medicine and education because you’re sick and stupid.

Thanks,

God.”

Apparently, according to writer Dan Arel, Americans were none-too happy with the critique — the post received such a massive, vitriolic response, algorithms automatically banned God for 30 days.

“FB banned Me for 30 days for having an opinion on military spending,” he attempted to explain to followers in a post.

But the “The Good Lord Above” had already lost posting privileges — everywhere on Facebook.

Although the account frequently draws the ire of Facebook users who either view the profile as blasphemous to their religion or disparaging of their country — God often criticizes American imperialism — the suspension over what amounts to an uncomfortable truth speaks to increasingly oppressive censorship.

“I posted this opinion on the day it was announced that Obamacare will be defunded and 24 million people will lose their healthcare,” said the verified account holder, who wished only to be known as ‘God.’ “The opinion goes viral, gaining over 100,000 likes and 15,000 shares. A few hundred people disagree with the opinion. Rather than move on, or even use the ‘angry’ reaction face, what do they do? They report the opinion as being offensive.”

Facebook’s attempts to pacify the perpetually-offended under the pretense of combating hate speech have, indeed, spawned the contempt of free speech advocates as a perilous foray into censorship of dissenting or unpleasant opinion.

Noticeably laden with irony, the suspension of God’s profile over a simple criticism evinces a factious pattern by the social media behemoth of censoring anything deemed ‘offensive’ by a minority of users.

Although the account tends toward the satirical, God has been known to cast aspersions against political policies he feels untenable to the poor and underprivileged — perhaps exactly as would be expected from a religious ‘being.’

“This is not the first 30-day ban I’ve ever gotten so unjustly,” God noted, adding he finds fault with President-elect Donald Trump’s intention to defund Obamacare. “Obviously, it’s a machine algorithm. Obviously, my opinions are not for everyone. But I have just as much a right to speak My Mind as Orange Hitler does.”

That, of course, speaks to the politically-charged atmosphere currently gripping America and further widening what already appears to be an insurmountable cleft between supporters of the incoming administration and, well, various factions opposed.

“The same people who love that Trump speaks his mind on Twitter are the same people who freaked out about the Tweet I posted and reported it as offensive,” God keenly observed.

Unfortunately, those most vociferously in disagreement have used Facebook’s growing number of report options to censor their opposition — but that isn’t the only issue. Obtuse algorithms — what God suspects responsible for his ban — have automatically removed posts not at all in violation of the platform’s Terms of Service or Community Standards.

Facebook’s algorithms have even banned the Conservative prime minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, who posted the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Nick Ut of naked Kim Phuc running from a napalm attack on a Buddhist monastery during the Vietnam War — an image widely credited with fomenting opposition to American involvement in the conflict.

Facebook has also removed the iconic image of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after being arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus during the Civil Rights movement.

More recently, the platform’s ignominious algorithms censored a photograph of the 16th-century statue of Neptune in the Italian city of Bologna’s Piazza del Nettuno.

However, the removal of those images and bans of those who dared post the photographs — performed variously by algorithms and human content curators — denote a slightly different issue than that faced by the satirical deity.

God seems to have been banned after perhaps a few hundred users took offense to the criticism of U.S. spending and flooded Facebook with reports — triggering the automatic suspension.

That portends the heavy-handed suppression will only continue, much to the consternation of those who champion the statement most often attributed to Voltaire, which reads:

“I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

For God, the ban over criticizing the government’s priorities is exasperating and all-too-telling of larger issues. As he put it,

“Humans are sick and stupid and they make God go crazy.”

Snopes, the Supposed Arbiter of ‘Fake News’ — Caught ‘Defrauding Own Site to Pay for Prostitutes’

Fraud, embezzlement, and using company funds to pay for prostitution are just a sampling of the accusations against the CEO of fact-checking website, Snopes — a site which, incidentally, is part of Facebook’s new panel to combat “fake news.”

Facebook’s choice to hire Snopes to arbitrate which news items will be allowed to stand and which should receive the Scarlet-Letter label ‘disputed’ already brought outrage — the site is notoriously left-leaning — but an exclusive report from the Daily Mail on alleged shady dealings should turn Mark Zuckerberg’s cheeks a deep shade of red.

David and Barbara Mikkelson, ex-spouses and founders of Snopes, have been hurling accusations allegations at one another in an ongoing bitter legal dispute following their divorce — and many of the claims don’t exactly give the company an air of professionalism.

Last month, David remarried — his new wife is a former porn actress and escort — and is now one of the site’s fact-checkers. As for the accusations, reports the Daily Mail,

“They are accusing each other of financial impropriety, with Barbara claiming her ex-husband is guilty of ‘embezzlement’ and suggesting he is attempting a ‘boondoggle’ to change tax arrangements, while David claims she took millions from their joint accounts and bought property in Las Vegas.”

As the Daily Mail notes, the couple met on an online message board with a folklore theme in the early 1990s, and created a fake organization — “The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society” — which, according to a Webby Awards profile, is “an entity dreamed up to help make the inquiries seem more legit.”

David, now CEO of Snopes — which the former couple created after marrying in 1995 — told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, as cited by the Daily Mail, “When I sent letters out to companies, I found I got a much better response with an official-looking organization’s stationery.”

Although they divorced in 2015, the pair remains embroiled in a caustic legal battle — mostly about money — and particularly concerning each other’s use of Snopes’ funds. Legal documents viewed by the Daily Mail — some of which are verifiable, as presented by the outlet, some not — evince a drawn out personal and corporate quarrel, which a lawyer, unidentified by the outlet, described as “contentious.”

Barbara, in court filings, accuses David of “raiding” Snopes’ bank account “for his personal use and attorney fees” and embezzling “$98,000 from our company over the course of four years, which were monies he expended upon himself and the prostitutes he hired …”

In a court document from June, she contended, “He’s been depleting the corporate account by spending monies from it on his personal expenses,” such as purchasing his ‘girlfriend’s’ ticket to Buenos Aires and $10,000 for a “personal vacation” to India.

David later claimed India to be a business prospecting trip to familiarize himself with the country in order to set up a fact-checking site there, and that the $10,000 only financed 22.5 percent of the total cost of the excursion.

Barbara apparently worried her ex-husband would drain Snopes’ entire account and said he must be prohibited from using the company’s debit card and checks “right away.”

Another acrid disagreement concerned David’s salary, which Barbara was obligated to approve. As the Daily Mail explains, “David wanted his salary raised from $240,000 to $360,000 – arguing that this would still put him below the ‘industry standards’ and that he should be paid up to $720,000 a year.”

In an April email to his ex-spouse, David wrote, “As I said, based on industry standards and our revenues, my salary should be about 2x to 3x what it is now. I’ll settle for $360K with the understanding that it’s to be retroactive to the start of the year.”

She balked, however, describing that request as “not even in the galaxy of reasonable.”

But the greed-tinged financial battle so divided the former ‘fact-checking’ couple, they even fought over the person assigned to settle disputes as the legal war raged. In fact, court filings show one arbiter subtly suggesting an arbiter step in to arbitrate yet another sub-battle in the ongoing war over money.

In the original settlement, Barbara received $1.5 million in stocks, savings, and other investments, as well as $660,000 upon agreement to give up her claim to their home in Calabasas, California.

David, on the other hand, kept their joint baseball card collection of undisclosed value and two savings accounts with a combined balance of $1.89 million.

Each took half of Snopes’ checking account at the end of 2015, with a balance of $240,000, and as the Daily Mail reports, “both of the former couple were due to receive $20,000 a month as a draw against profits, as well as a share of any net profit the company made after those payments.” Monthly payments were later increased to $30,000 for both David and Barbara.

But their monetary avarice still didn’t cease, as “court documents show that a decision on David’s salary for 2016 became bogged down in legal argument when Barbara referred it to an arbiter, and the appointment of the arbiter became itself a matter of dispute.”

Since the acrimonious divorce, David hired Elyssa Young — better known as Erin O’Bryn, a longtime escort and porn star, and now his wife — as administrative assistant at Snopes. According to the Daily Mail, Young’s escort profiles on professional sites and social media are still active, though it’s unclear whether she still works in that field.

Staff member: Elyssa Young is also known as Erin O’Bryn and maintains a website adveritising her services as an escort with photographs of her over the years

However, of particular concern about Young — given Snopes will soon wield the almighty censorship hammer for Facebook — is her deeply political past. The maybe-former escort ran an unsuccessful bid on the Libertarian ticket for U.S. Congress in Hawai`i in 2004, and became the subject of legitimate controversy for a snafu in which she misspelled her Republican competitor’s name — on her official campaign website.

Young isn’t the only eyebrow-raising Snopes employee — Kim LaCapria, the company’s lead ‘fact-checker,’ boasts openly of being a dominatrix known as “Vice Vixen,” and wrote on her personal blog she “played scrabble [sic], smoked pot, and posted to Snopes. That’s what I did on my day ‘on’ too.”

David, who is legally prohibited from discussing anything concerning the dispute with Barbara, told the Daily Mail there is no “standardized procedure” in place for Snopes fact-checking “since the nature of this material can vary widely,” but the process “involves multiple stages of editorial oversight, so no output is the result of a single person’s discretion.”

Rather alarmingly under the circumstances, he added there are no ‘set requirements’ for Snopes fact-checkers given the broadness of the job “would be difficult to encompass in any single blanket set of standards.

“Accordingly, our editorial staff is drawn from diverse backgrounds; some of them have degrees and/or professional experience in journalism, and some of them don’t.”

Anyone with even a cursory concern about freedom of speech and of the press is likely already distressed that Facebook’s self-appointed mission to slay ‘fake news’ includes only left-leaning organizations like ABC News, Politifact, FactCheck.org, and, of course, Snopes.

But that distress could turn to sheer horror knowing one of these supposed ‘fact-checkers’ can’t agree on a single point, once made up a fake organization just to appear professional — and is ensnared in a war over seemingly every penny.

Snopes will profit from its arrangement with Facebook — but how those profits will be spent appears entirely up in the air — and for the courts to decide.

However, one point incontestably underpinning the personal battle behind the scene at the company demands an urgent question — with money as the seemingly only motivator, can the public ever be assured Snopes’ checked facts are accurate at all?

Perhaps Snopes has finally been Snoped.

Precedent Set — Germany to Fine Facebook $500K for Every ‘Fake News’ Post they Don’t Delete

Germany — Germany now says if Facebook refuses to deal with “fake news” in a timely manner, it will fine the social media platform €500,000 (around $525,000) for each false or hate speech item it fails to remove within 24 hours.

Thomas Oppermann, chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, suggests a strict law with concurrent stiff penalty might be the best method of combating the plethora of “fake news” now apparently flooding the interwebs.

“Facebook did not avail itself of the opportunity to regulate the issue of complaint management itself,” Oppermann told Der Spiegel in an interview Friday. “Now market dominating platforms like Facebook will be legally required to build a legal protection office in Germany that is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

According to Deutsche Welle, this would allow putative ‘victims’ of fake news or hate speech to contact Facebook and request action be taken.

“If, after appropriate examination, Facebook does not delete the offending message within 24 hours,” Oppermann continued, “it should expect individual fines of up to 500,000 euros ($523,320).”

Germany’s announcement comes on the heels of Facebook’s formally announcing its newest plan to deal with the same “fake news” issue — the company will partner with adamantly left-leaning organizations Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck.org, the Associated Press, and ABC News to vet and label items “disputed.” Corporate media largely lauded that announcement, ignoring entirely the distinct potentiality for the effort to amount to blatant censorship of all ideas not in lock step with the neoliberal establishment.

All of this, despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declaring shortly after the U.S. presidential election,

“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

Zuckerberg and Facebook quickly changed their tune when it became clear the Democrat establishment wished to target alternative, independent, and right-leaning media organizations to shoulder the blame of its own shortcomings in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.

While corporate media presstitutes praised fealty to Hillary Clinton, alternative outlets reported on the contents of documents leaked to Wikileaks concerning the former secretary of state — including collusion by those same ‘reporters’ with Clinton’s campaign.

Indeed, though analysts first decried the idea ‘fake news’ or misinformation swayed the election in favor of Donald Trump, hysteria amongst Clintonites and NeverTrump Republicans spread like wildfire online as the volatile situation in the United States threatened to explode into outright conflict. Now, a growing number of Electoral College electors from both sides of the aisle have declared they will not vote — or cast their votes for Trump — until an investigation into Russian election interference can be performed.

Russian hackers and pro-Russia propaganda constitutes the twin, parallel ‘problem’ having befallen the U.S. — unnamed officials in the CIA ostensibly found after an analysis that Russian actors hacked Democrat Party files and provided information to Wikileaks — but provided literally zero evidence to back up the slanderous claim.

Russian President Vladimir Putin — recently himself named by President Obama for involvement in the unproven hacks — has categorically denied Russia meddled in the election or hacked the DNC. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray have all — among many others — come forward to denounce the idea of Russian hackers as absurd and baseless.

“Our source is not the Russian government,” Assange told Sean Hannity in an interview, in which the Wikileaks founder discussed the inanity of claims Russia had influenced the U.S. election.

Assange elaborated that although his organization prefers to proffer no qualifying details about individuals who provide documents, he felt obligated to set the record straight in this case, so “we’ve had to come out and say, ‘no, it’s not a State party, stop trying to distract in that way, and pay attention to the content of the publications.”

“So, in other words, when you say State party, it wasn’t another State — like Russia, or some other country?” Hannity asked.

“Correct,” Assange replied.

Nevertheless, iterations of foreign influence in elections — whether via hacking, propaganda, or fake news — rattled Germany’s nerves sufficiently to take such staunch measures against Facebook.

In fact, censorship according to government standards is business-as-usual for the social media behemoth, and Facebook has worked with independent media organizations in Germany to remove offensive content and hate speech for some time. But the country’s plot to impose stiff fines on Facebook for disseminating fake news represents a dangerous and slippery slope for users in Europe as ‘fake news’ is often a matter of opinion.

But it isn’t without basis. Germany is effectively looking to the U.S. for methods to avert a crisis with its coming elections — viewing the putative Trump fiasco as a prime motivator for combating disinformation ahead of time, as it is widely believed the credible reporting by American independent media on corruption by the Dems helped hand Trump the presidency.

As Quartz reports, “The move is partly in response to fears that fake news posts could have an affect on the German parliamentary elections taking place in 2017, according to the Financial Times. Facebook has repeatedly said since the Nov. 8 election of Donald Trump in the US that fake news on its site, which has roughly 180 million users in the US and Canada, could not have affected the election.”

Although ‘fake news’ is generally viewed as a problematic issue which needs to be dealt with, the more liberty-minded have cautioned vociferously that even light censorship of ideas will cascade into widespread editing of thought.

If given an inch, those in power prefer to take miles — and it would seem Facebook, the U.S., and Germany have started down that lengthy, perilous road.

Zuckerberg Just Revealed Facebook’s 7-Point Plan to Censor “Fake News” and It’s Chilling

Until corporate media and the neoliberal establishment refused to acknowledge their direct role in the election of Donald Trump and threw a temper-tantrum about misinformation on social media to scapegoat blame, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg balked at the notion faulty reports circulating on social media had anything at all to do with the November 8th shocker.

“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post to his platform last Saturday. “The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

Now, rather than stand by that original assertion, Zuckerberg instead cast all logic aside and unleashed a Machiavellian seven-point plan to eradicate the “very small amount” of false information — read: all opinion not in lock step with the establishment narrative — from the newsfeeds of Facebook’s billion-plus users.

Because, apparently, we can’t be trusted to think for ourselves.

“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” Zuckerberg wrote late Friday evening, apparently forgetting what he posted exactly one week ago. “Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.”

Curiously, the head of the Facebook Ministry of Truth neglected to explain how the 65 corporate presstitutes and myriad mendacious mainstream outlets exposed in Wikileaks’ Podesta Files for colluding with the Clintonite establishment were awarded a free pass to spread propagandic disinformation — and, frequently, flagrant lies.

Worse, what Zuckerberg wrote next should send chills down the spines of anyone who has ever been forced to deal with fallout from the social media platform’s already-rampant and oft-inexplicable censorship via erroneous and revenge reporting on posts, arbitrary unpublishing of pages, ghosting, and newsfeed suppression — as well as those who look to Facebook for alternatives to vapid mainstream media:

“Historically, we have relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not. Anyone on Facebook can report any link as false, and we use signals from those reports along with a number of others — like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes — to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation. Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize this content in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread.”

Snopes? Really? The same Snopes that took it upon itself to “debunk” an inside joke in meme form that happened to go viral?

In just those three sentences, Zuckerberg does more to expose the innate perils of censorship than any scholarly tome on the subject ever could — personal opinion always operates the censor’s heavy hand. It’s inescapable fact that what one individual deems devoid of value, another may find sacrilegiously offensive — while another may laugh off as innocuous.

Dismissing that scripture — or, perhaps, forgetting it formed the foundation for First Amendment protections of free speech, press, and expression — Zuckerberg laid out his plan to combat the ‘relatively small percentage of misinformation,’ encompassing the following points:

1. Stronger detection. The most important thing we can do is improve our ability to classify misinformation. This means better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.

2. Easy reporting. Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster.

3. Third party verification. There are many respected fact checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.

4. Warnings. We are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.

5. Related articles quality. We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed.

6. Disrupting fake news economics. A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam. We’re looking into disrupting the economics with ads policies like the one we announced earlier this week, and better ad farm detection.

7. Listening. We will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in particular, to better understand their fact checking systems and learn from them.

In other words, apart from spam detection, which other websites and platforms have effectively combatted for years, Facebook’s plan to ‘detect’ misinformation will be based on what any idiot says. Although the people of this planet generally operate from a place of honesty and integrity, let’s face it, humans have nasty penchants for retribution, revenge, sanctimonious arrogance, self-righteousness, misjudgment, mischaracterization, hyperbole, and — most imperatively — making mistakes.

Relying on people’s personal assessments of possibly-false news items as the primary driver of what deserves to be branded with a Scarlet Letter “F” is a system destined to fail everyone before it even begins.

Facebook still does not provide the means to rebut post and link removals or the sudden unpublishing of pages — the platform has, in essence, a shoot first, ask questions later attitude when it receives a report something violated its Community Standards. This has already imperiled owners of perfectly legitimate pages with millions of fans to the arduous process of challenging unjustified reports and coping in the meantime with devastating loss of revenue.

Nowhere in Friday’s announcement does Zuckerberg address those concerns — which will exponentially increase if and when the plan begins. With little to no recourse to defend against what will undoubtedly be an explosion of posts erroneously flagged as ‘false information,’ Facebook is brazenly handing over the censor’s black marker to a populace already too lackadaisical to bother investigating questionable news items.

Therein lies the greatest threat to a free press and free speech this country has seen since Red Scare McCarthyism — Facebook, backed by a polarized public, will be the arbiter of acceptable thought — and those who dare question or criticize that thought will pay with their livelihoods.

Far worse, everyone will pay the price of lost access to information. We’re already starting to.

Responses to Zuckerberg’s announcement post seemed largely ambivalent, and many took the opportunity to question the validity of the authoritarian plan.

“Please just be a neutral platform that display original voice from people as long as the content are not illegal. Do not try to treat your users are idiots and need somebody to tell them what is right what’s wrong. Fake or non-fake, people will figure it out. It’s dangerous such decision or filtering will be done by your company or any other power. This will be called censorship if it happens in China or Russia,” user Chen Li implored.

Others chided the head of Facebook for the disingenuous failure to apply the same standards to the mendacious corporate media.

“Mark, will you also fight government sponsored propaganda of the United States?” asked user Jiri Klouda. “What about articles where unnamed government officials intentionally share false information with journalists, often with grave consequences. Like for example in the lead up to the Iraq war, or many other wars. We’d like to know that if you are going to fight against disinformation that it will be applied evenly and not just in one sided way as the mass market US media companies do.”

Some noted how the platform’s censorship and arbitrary suppression already irreparably harms honest businesspeople.

“You advertised Facebook as a great place for businesses to have pages, small businesses did well, like mine did. My 783k page that took years to build was unpublished, thousands of people have had their pages removed without reason, businesses are suffering, you are taking food off the table, heat from people’s homes and kids presents away from under the tree. The Sad thing is you don’t seem to care; you won’t listen to us. I hope you have a great Christmas Mark Zuckerberg because lots of people won’t be able to because of you,” wrote Laura Holmes.

Facebook’s plan might, indeed, rid the platform of misinformation — but, to be sure, it will also rid the platform of dissenting voices, the debate of controversial topics, editorial opinions provoking new thought, and alternative news outlets whose integrity proved the corporate media worthless.

This plan will, in short, rid Facebook of the truth — that beautiful diversity of thought we once celebrated, rather than snuffed.

Report Exposes Inner Workings of Facebook and How Clinton Loyalists Control Your Newsfeed

Censorship by Facebook has become a thorn in the side of nearly anyone with an opinion differing from the narrative touted by the corporate press — for instance, sentiments not praising Hillary Clinton — and now, through both a new report from Reuters and emails published by Wikileaks, we have insight into why certain posts are targeted.

Facebook relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human judgment to remove posts deemed offensive, violent, or otherwise unacceptable to its community standards — but precisely how the ultimate call to take down posts, pages, and groups are made remains unknown.

And Facebook takedowns, no matter the improvements to the process the social media behemoth claims to make, have been no less controversial or questionable — and those whose posts are censored have little if any recourse to argue their case.

Recent examples of head-scratchers which led to an international uproar, include Facebook’s removal of the iconic Vietnam War photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc — who, at just 9-years-old, was captured on film by an Associated Press photographer fleeing the aftermath of an errant napalm attack near a Buddhist pagoda in the village of Trang Bang.

That photograph helped cement in the collective American mind the horrors of the war, and ultimately fueled the success of the anti-war effort — but Facebook arbitrarily pulled the image for nudity — and proceeded even to ban the page of the Conservative prime minister of Norway for also posting the image.

Ultimately, the social media company reversed course in that case — but not before also taking down the equally iconic image of civil rights leader Rosa Park’s arrest.

But taking down of the image of Kim Phúc might not have been simply an error of AI, since it had been used as a specific example in training the teams responsible for content removal, two unnamed former Facebook employees told Reuters.

“Trainers told content-monitoring staffers that the photo violated Facebook policy, despite its historical significance, because it depicted a naked child, in distress, photographed without her consent, the employees told Reuters.”

In the final decision to reverse that censorship, Facebook head of the community operations division, Justin Osofsky, admitted it had been a “mistake.”

According to Reuters, to whom many current and former Facebook employees spoke on condition of anonymity, the process of judging which posts deserve to be remove and which should be allowed will, in certain instances, be left to the discretion of a small cadre of the company’s elite executives.

In addition to Osofsky, Global Policy Chief Monika Bickert; government relations chief, Joel Kaplan; vice president for public policy and communications, Elliot Schrage; and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg make the final call on censorship and appeals.

“All five studied at Harvard, and four of them have both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the elite institution. All but Sandberg hold law degrees. Three of the executives have longstanding personal ties to Sandberg,” the outlet notes. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also occasionally offers guidance in difficult decisions. But there are others.

Company spokeswoman Christine Chen explained, “Facebook has a broad, diverse and global network involved in content policy and enforcement, with different managers and senior executives being pulled in depending on the region and the issue at hand.”

For those on the receiving end of what could only be described as lopsided and inexplicable censorship, recourse is generally limited and can be nearly impossible to come by. Often, the nature of posts and pages removed insinuates political motivations on the part of the censors.

Indeed, and once again flaring international controversy, Facebook disabled, among others, the accounts of editors of Quds and Shehab New Agency — prominent Palestinian media organizations — without explanation or even a specific example given for justification.

Although three of four Palestinian-focused accounts were restored, Facebook refused to comment to either Reuters or the accounts’ owners why the decision was reversed, except to say it had been an ‘error.’

In fact, although Chen and other Facebook insiders spoke with Reuters directly about contentious content removal policies and procedures, many details of the processes remain covert and sorely intransparent to the public who is so often forced to cope with the consequences.

Earlier this year, an exposé by Gizmodo showing Facebook’s suppression of conservative outlets via its “Trending Topics” section appeared to evidence extreme bias in favor of liberal and corporate media mainstays. Alternative media, too, which provides reports counter to the mainstream political and foreign policy paradigm, has often been the subject of controversial take-downs, censorship, and suppressive tactics — either directly by Facebook, or through convoluted algorithms and artificial intelligence bots.

However, considering Sheryl Sandberg and her loyalists populate the top-level group deciding the fate for content removal complaints, it would appear Wikileaks could provide answers for both post censorship and suppression of outlets not vowing complete fealty to the preferred, left-leaning narrative.

In a June 4, 2015, email to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta — an enormous cache of whose emails are still being published on a daily basis by Wikileaks — penned by Sandberg in response to condolences on the death of her husband, states, in part,

“And I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids.”

After a wave of post removals and temporary page bans, it appears Facebook has begun to come to its senses for what actually violates community standards — and what might have political worth contrary to the views of its executives.

Senior members of Facebook’s policy team recently posted about the laxing of rules governing community standards, which — though welcome — might only provide temporary relief. Quoted by the Wall Street Journal, they wrote:

“In the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards.”

While the social media giant deems itself a technology, and not news, platform, Facebook is still the bouncing off point for issues of interest for an overwhelming percentage of its users. Although it perhaps has some responsibility in regard to the removal of certain content, putting censorship in the hands of only a few individuals in certain instances is a chilling reminder of the fragility — and grave importance — of free speech.