The Censorship has begun

  • @lemmylommy
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    29012 days ago

    This is not mildly infuriating. Its incredibly worrying.

  • @[email protected]OP
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    12 days ago

    Running Shortlist includes blocking hashtags for:

    democrat (but not republican)

    voteblue (but not votered)

    presidentbiden (but not president harris)

    kamala

    liberal

    liberals

    leftist

    leftists

    barackobama (but not presidentobama)

    obama (but not obamas)

    berniesanders

    votebiden (votekamala, votetrump works tho)

    democracy (WOW)

    presidentcarter

    fuckputin

    makeamericasmartagain

    libertarian (for some reason)

    igcensorship

    factsoverfiction

    fuckdemocrats

    fuckrepublicans

    bluewave (redwave still works, shocker)

    politicalleft (blocked, but politicalright isn’t)

    fascism

    fascist

    antifascism

    prochoice

      • @ZoopZeZoop
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        911 days ago

        Don’t share this. The stylization is too cool to allow the assholes to see it and use it.

        • @Thunderbird4
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          611 days ago

          Nah, I’d rather push them into embracing actual, full on nazi symbology. Believe it or not, the majority of the American public do not see republicans as nazis. The sooner they look like it, the sooner the last plausible deniability falls, and the sooner the “cheaper eggs,” “voted for the economy” idiots have to face the realities of their decisions.

  • @[email protected]
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    12212 days ago

    I dont even know how to react to this. It feels like my reaction to everything has been holy shit this is fucking insane. I’m burnt out, I just need to tend to my own garden. I cant have sympathy for people who support the right and these stupid social media platforms.

    • @snekerpimp
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      5412 days ago

      I have that same thought, but then I think this is exactly how all the non-Jewish people felt as hitler was rising to power. I end up getting even more angry and looking up where to buy fertilizer.

        • SeekPie
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          912 days ago

          Completely unrelated to the topic, but did you know you can make crude gunpowder called “black powder” using only sulfur and saltpeter (KNO3) fertilizers and charcoal?

    • @[email protected]
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      511 days ago

      That’s kind of the point. A constant barrage of stupid and dangerous shit to keep you enraged until you burn put. You cannot stay enraged for four years and nobody will care to do anything if it’s a constant stream of small and big steps to fascism. They’re not removing all liberties at once, but in a lot of steps so that it becomes impossible to agree on which step becomes the straw to break the camel’s back.

    • @[email protected]
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      311 days ago

      Protip: Disconnect yourself from the online media circus.
      Bring yourself up to speed with current developments once a week.
      And focus your energy on helping people around you who need help.

      You can’t stop fascism all by yourself. But you can affect your immediate surroundings.
      And if enough people do that, there will be resistance everywhere.

  • @9point6
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    12 days ago

    I thought they were gonna promote more political content

    • ThoGot
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      12 days ago

      Yeah but only the right political conten

      (The choice of definition for the word right is left to the reader)

  • @[email protected]
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    9011 days ago

    Meta says its working urgently to fix a problem with Instagram which results in a “results hidden” message when users search for the terms “Democrat” or “Democrats”.

    If that’s hard to fix, I recommend shutting down the servers forever.

    • JackbyDev
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      1811 days ago

      Makes me wonder if it was something like a lot of people were scrolling those hashtags and leaving hate comments and it triggered some automated hide feature and now they’re trying to find some middle ground. That’s being very generous to Meta though.

        • @[email protected]
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          311 days ago

          I’m sure it happened just after Trump took office with explicit technocratic goals ENTIRELY on accident.

          • @[email protected]
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            411 days ago

            *technofascist

            All I can think about is how Israel’s AI targeting program (lavender) is coming to a leftist near you. Combine with ukraines AI drones and we have a technofascist future where dissent gets removed permanently. Instead of banning your account they’ll be banning your life.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 days ago

              They’ve always been the same thing. If you took the concept of a technocracy at its most idealized form it’s still innately undemocratic.

              It might, possibly, work, but it’s still authoritarian in nature.

              But technofascist does strip their veneer of being actual engineers away I suppose, so it definitely has benefits.

              • @[email protected]
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                011 days ago

                To the uninitiated technocrat sounds like techno democrat - techno democracy. It doesn’t sound that bad. Technofascist doesn’t have the same muddiness - it’s clear what they are.

    • @Agent641
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      1011 days ago

      It’s hard emotionally

  • @[email protected]
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    8812 days ago

    German news magazine Der Spiegel wrote they had talked to a Meta representative and they said “This is definitely an error and we will fix it fast”

    My personal take: An incident like this illustrates how vulnerable we are to being censored and silenced when using social media and communication channels owned by billionaires. It’s time not only to leave those platforms but to educate your friends and family why this is absolutely necessary. No more excuses.

    Original: Update, 13.30 Uhr: Auf SPIEGEL-Anfrage hat sich Meta inzwischen kurz und knapp zu dem Phänomen geäußert. »Dies ist eindeutig ein Fehler, den wir schnell beheben werden«, so eine Sprecherin des Konzerns.

    • Scrubbles
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      13912 days ago

      I know as a software engineer I frequently accidentally release bugs that block entire political parties after their opponents take power. It’s one of those things most people forget to write unit tests for.

        • Bakkoda
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          1512 days ago

          Silly Copilot. My bad folks, it’s this crazy AI.

      • @jj4211
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        911 days ago

        No no, the bug is it told you it hid results instead of just secretly hiding them. Hiding them was the intended behavior.

    • @[email protected]
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      3112 days ago

      At the moment a search for #democrat on my facebook page returns a bunch of posts saying that searches for #democrat are blocked and a bunch (more recent ones) saying it isn’t.

      I was skeptical that this was an outrage campaign but with a real news source having a quote verifying the behavior from the company (the above referenced article was on the Der Spiegel front page and the update is at the bottom.) I’m less skeptical.

      Pushing through a change doesn’t happen by accidentally clicking on a button. Where I work it’s a multistep process requiring manager approval. Even if the block happened by mistake it still means there was a mechanism in place to make it happen, configured so that it only censored left leaning hashtags. This is “not good.”

      • Live Your Lives
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        311 days ago

        I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an AI or other automated system blocking it, because an outright block instead of a shadow ban seems unlikely to have been done by human hands. But that just indicates that there are systemic issues or biases that clearly favor one party over the other, and that’s not much better.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      2612 days ago

      They will now shadow ban these topics, so people can catch them red handed. But users will just never see it in their feed

      • @[email protected]
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        12 days ago

        Yeah, that was my thought too. What a dumb way to censor by search input instead of censoring the output.

        It probably went like this at Meta:

        Product Manager: Hey we just got this word filter list from HQ to be implemented ASAP.

        Devs: Sure thing boss.

        • @tburkhol
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          412 days ago

          That’s the mistake: putting it in the open ban list instead of the shadow ban list.

          Dev acting in #resistance or dev making an honest mistake? I suppose we’ll never know.

    • @[email protected]
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      1712 days ago

      they said “This is definitely an error and we will fix it fast”

      I’m pretty sure that’s literally what they always say.

      Like, has a mainstream brainwashing platform ever admitted to making the change and owning up to it? As far as I can remember, these features keep accidentally getting thought up, coded and released into the production product.

      I’m at the point where there is no benefit of the doubt, especially with malicious actors like Twitter and Facebook. If there isn’t proof they didn’t intend to release it (and you can’t exactly prove a negative), it was on purpose.

    • @MisterFrog
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      111 days ago

      This has happened dozens of times, each time it was an “error”. Press X to doubt.

  • FlashMobOfOne
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    7911 days ago

    I’m not sure how many years of headlines you all need before you just stop using these services. You already know they artificially lower your engagement, so you’re just literally wasting your time at this point. (If you’re not a fascist, that is.)

    • @Evotech
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      2111 days ago

      Preaching to the choir here

  • مهما طال الليل
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    6912 days ago

    Benito Mussolini is often attributed with the quote: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

    No one can argue the US isn’t corporatist.

    • @TrickDacy
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      5512 days ago

      I just confirmed it in the US. #republican returns plenty of results.

        • @jaybone
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          212 days ago

          Your Republican Party is left progressive yes? So they probably didn’t account for geo location when they started banning search terms.

    • @gusgalarnyk
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      4612 days ago

      Yes, I confirmed. I live in Germany and hashtags like democrat or berniesanders are blocked and hashtags like Republican and donaldjtrump are not blocked.

      I was only on Instagram for my friends to exchange reels and post life updates like once a year but this crosses another line. Migrating from all these monopolies is such a tax on my time but this is a small way to hurt these big giants.

      I recommend everyone do the same when they have the time. I’d like to learn about RSS feeds and go back to a bunch of individual blogs for friends and family. Decentralized power is I guess the most important characteristic to look for these days. Fuck, this correction period is going to suck.

    • XNX
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      2012 days ago

      Happens if you search #berniesanders too but mot #donaldtrump

    • @Garyx23x
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      1312 days ago

      Also happening on TikTok now after the “ban”.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      412 days ago

      You can google it, it’s like that for many people.

      I can search #domocrat again, but not #fuckputin or #prochoice etc.

      You can also test for yourself, this screenshot was from my instagram search

  • @[email protected]
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    4011 days ago

    Don’t worry! Free Speech Republicans AGAINST Censorship will be FURIOUS when they hear about this!