Facebook, Google, et al., And DEI: Let's Not Forget Their Insufferable Sanctimony

February 12, 2025/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian, 34 Comments

A few days ago, Google announced that it had abandoned its targets for “diversity, equity and inclusion” for its workforce. Here is the February 5 New York Times article covering the announcement. According to the Times, Google attributed the change of policy to its need “as a federal contractor . . . to comply with President Trump’s executive orders opposing diversity, equity and inclusion policies.” Google’s announcement came about a month after Facebook parent Meta had (formally) made the same change of policy. (See CNBC’s January 10 piece here covering the Meta announcement.). Google and Facebook are now two leaders in what has become a full-on parade of corporate giants making the same sudden 180 degree reversal of what had previously been broadcast as fundamental corporate policy. Among others in this group are Amazon, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s, and even Disney.

Was the commitment to DEI of Corporate America, and particularly of the tech giants, really this shallow, that they would all reverse course completely and suddenly and in unison and without a peep of objection?

The truth is that these companies are all breathing a huge sigh of relief at having finally been let off the DEI hook. Their DEI promises were always a ludicrous fantasy. And they were all quickly running into an impossible situation where the promises they had made could not be continued.

Meanwhile DEI had become an increasingly militant and desperate racial spoils regime. As further progress toward its goals became less and less possible, maintaining the regime inevitably required ever more enforced agreement and silencing of dissent. The end of this mess is something we should all welcome. And I do welcome its end, which I certainly hope is permanent.

But I can’t just let the whole thing go as if it had never happened. We have all been subjected to a decade and more of insufferable moral preening from these people claiming to be our betters. Before moving on, it is appropriate to remind ourselves — and them — of some of the endless sanctimony, and of the hypocrisy that it covered.

I previously had two posts — this one in June 2020, and this one in September 2021 — reporting on the DEI promises of the big tech firms. The 2020 post provided some of the history:

[I]n the Spring of 2014, Jesse Jackson made the rounds of the annual meetings of many of the [big tech] companies; and suddenly the dominoes all quickly fell. Essentially all of these companies began releasing annual “diversity reports” starting in mid-2014.

And thus, starting in 2014, we have annual versions of these “diversity reports” for each of the tech giants. For today, let’s focus on Facebook and Google.

Facebook’s initial Report in 2014, “Building a More Diverse Facebook,” was not a long document, just a few pages. But it began with the obligatory moral sanctimony:

At Facebook, diversity is essential to achieving our mission. We build products to connect the world, and this means we need a team that understands and reflects many different communities, backgrounds and cultures. Research also shows that diverse teams are better at solving complex problems and enjoy more dynamic workplaces. So at Facebook we’re serious about building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics.

So OK, what was the percentage of blacks in the tech portion of the workforce? From a chart toward the end of the document, the figure is (drumroll!!!) 1%.

Fast forward seven years to 2021. Here is now the eighth version of Facebook’s Report. The sanctimony of course continues. Example:

Connecting the world takes people with different backgrounds and points of view to build products that work better for everyone. This means building a workforce that reflects the diversity of the people we serve.

And the percent of black workers in tech? Again, you will need to go to a chart at the end of the document. The answer is: 2.1%.

The 2022 version of the Facebook diversity Report seems to be suddenly reduced in size. Might that indicate that something is going on? Looking through the charts at the end, we find that the percent of black workers in the tech area is now up to all of 2.4%.

In 2023, as you may recall, Facebook underwent a first-time downsizing. According to StockAnalysis.com, total employment at Meta Platforms, Inc. went from 86,482 on December 31, 2022 to 67,317 on December 31, 2023. If this was like all other corporate downsizings, they obviously looked to eliminate first the unproductive employees and make-work jobs.

And suddenly, I can’t find any more annual diversity reports for Facebook for 2023 and 2024! If any reader can find them, kindly provide a link. Although Facebook only formally announced the end to its DEI regime in January 2025, it could well be that they had quietly and surreptitiously begun burying it a couple of years ago. Perhaps you are now starting to understand why Mark Zuckerberg was so quick to join President Trump in calling an end to the DEI regime.

Over at Google, they at least continued the diversity reports, and in the same format, through 2024 (although I would not expect to see another for 2025). There is plenty of swearing allegiance and loyalty to the woke DEI project. As a random example, this is from the intro to the 2020 Report:

Google has made progress in several areas of hiring and retaining talented professionals from underrepresented groups. We also continued our work to understand the identities, intersectionalities, and experiences of Googlers worldwide. More broadly, we made a wide array of investments to strengthen the diverse communities both within and outside Google. Looking forward, we will continue to use data-informed efforts to support diversity, equity and inclusion as we grow and scale . . . .

Google’s 2024 Report helpfully includes charts that track changes in the data by year since the initial Report in 2014. To find how the percent of black workers in tech jobs has changed over the years, you will need to go to a chart deeply buried on page 78 of the document. The answer is that that percent has gone from 1.5% in 2014 to 4.2% in 2024.

Back in my September 2021 post linked above, I referred to my own efforts over many years at a large law firm to help recruit, hire and retain increasing numbers of blacks and other minorities. My comment was that this was a “difficult, long-term and often frustrating process.” Google, Facebook and their brethren thought they were a lot smarter and better than the rest of us. Well, welcome to the real world.

 "Insufferable sanctimony"

Daniel Greenfield Unleashed

By Rich Kozlovich

As I've said in the past, Daniel Greenfield is brilliant and prolific.  In a previous article Daniel called the "media, the least democratic body outside of North Korea", and he's being kind about them.  My view is the media isn't just wrong, it's evil it's corrupt to the core, and mankind's greatest enemy.

Virtually everything the main stream media promotes is predicated on lies.  Lies of commission and lies of omission, and in order to find the fact, you must look behind the curtain, and now it's possible because we have a alternate media that's not beholden to big tech, big corporations, big government and a corrupt deep state.  

Charging Black Officers in Black Man’s Death is Racist - The first rule of America is that everything is racist. If you’re confused about this rule, you’re racist. If the sun rises in the morning, it’s racist. If it doesn’t rise in the morning, it’s also racist. If the earth turns out to be flat, it’s racist. If a black man dies in police custody and nothing happens to the officers, it’s racist. If a black man dies in a confrontation with black police officers and they’re put on trial, it’s racist......This was never about race, it was about crime. But making it about race is a convenient distraction and a way for the Left to mobilize for the next wave of political and cultural violence against America......

2 Years After Early Release, ‘American Taliban’ Was Meeting With ISIS Recruiter - Who could have seen this coming?  John Walker Lindh – the so-called “American Taliban” – has been released from prison, a move Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared “unconscionable”. Lindh served 17 years of a 20-year sentence after he was captured in 2001 fighting in Afghanistan. His early release has sparked fierce criticism, with many believing he still harbours extremist views. Thank Obama, as usual...........  

Trump’s Facebook Ban Means Elections Take Place by UN Speech Rules -  Big Tech giveth and taketh away. And then giveth again. On a temporary basis. Until it takes it away again.  Former British politician Nick Clegg announced that Facebook will restore Trump’s account because “social media is rooted in the belief that open debate and the free flow of ideas are important values.” Clegg, one in a series of cutouts for Facebook, credits a complicated process that includes its “semi-independent” oversight board. Except now that the Twitter Files gave us a peek behind the curtain, we know that Big Tech’s processes only apply to little people and that there are careful political and economic calculations at the higher levels to deal with more prominent accounts.....  

DeSantis to Make Leftists Defend Child Rapists - It wasn’t all that long ago that quite a few Republicans had climbed on board the “criminal justice reform” bandwagon and were complaining how mean and racist all the laws were. You still see some conservatives repeating the lefty talking point that the 1994 Crime Bill was somehow racist. (Not only wasn’t it racist, it was a heavily watered-down approach that was supported by black leaders.) After the BLM race riots, conservatives have hesitantly pivoted back to trying to get back to where we were before shoplifting was legalized and looting stores became a fun weekday activity. Like a lot of conservative projects, this tends to involve complaining about how things are and suggesting they’d be satisfied to back to the way things were in 2018, with little in the way of meaningful proposals to make that happen. Meanwhile, Gov. DeSantis decided to jam the Overton Window hard in the other direction.......  

How the IRS Helped Fund the Atlanta Riots - Even after an ‘Atlanta Forest Defender’ shot a Georgia state trooper in the stomach and his comrades set off race riots in the city, the leftist group at the center of it all is still fundraising.  This comes months after the leftists threw molotov cocktails at police and nearly burned an elderly driver to death. Multiple members of the ‘occupation’ have been arrested on domestic terrorism charges. And yet the IRS and Georgia’s Secretary of State have done nothing.  Even Twitter suspended ‘Scenes from the Atlanta Forest’, an account calling for a “Night of Rage” and “reciprocal violence to be done to the police and their allies”, but the IRS has yet to take action to stop the ‘Atlanta Forest Defenders’ from taking in tax-deductible donations......

Facebook, other tech giants censor inconvenient facts about climate change

By Bjorn Lomborg February 7, 2022

The online world has become a free-speech battleground. Tech platforms have sided with illiberal regimes to censor posts while flagging “misinformation” in free countries. We all share a legitimate interest in avoiding outright falsehoods, but much censorship today — whether at dictators’ behest or in the name of eradicating “misinformation” — ultimately is about restricting discourse to a narrow corridor of the politically acceptable. That makes it harder to identify smart policies.

This is especially troubling for important issues like climate change. Global warming is real and man-made. However, social-media giants — Facebook in particular — are going far beyond censoring people for denying its existence.

Facebook monitors what people say about climate change in 100 countries and uses third-party fact-checkers to identify misinformation for flagging or removal...........To Read More....

China’s cyber-aggression and the U.S. capitalists who abet it

Paul Mirengoff January 3, 2022

The New York Times reports on Red China’s “digital manhunt“: The Chinese government, which has built an extensive digital infrastructure and security apparatus to control dissent on its own platforms, is going to even greater lengths to extend its internet dragnet to unmask and silence those who criticize the country on Twitter, Facebook and other international social media. These new investigations, targeting sites blocked inside China, are relying on sophisticated ...........Read more...

 

BOMBSHELL: In court filing, Facebook admits "fact checks" are nothing more than opinion

Facebook has admitted in a court of law that such fact checks are not factual at all, but merely opinions.

Anthony Watts 21 Comments  

People send me stuff.  People send me stuff.  As we have previously reported, journalist John Stossel is suing Facebook after Facebook’s ‘fact checkers’ labeled climate change information that Stossel posted as “false and misleading”. In the middle of all this is the nefarious website “Climate Feedback” which has a bunch of climate zealots that write up what they claim are “fact checks” for articles, videos, and news stories they disagree with.

Facebook just blew the “fact check” claim right out of the water in court.

In its response to Stossel’s defamation claim, Facebook responds on Page 2, Line 8 in the court document (download it below) that Facebook cannot be sued for defamation (which is making a false and harmful assertion) because its ‘fact checks’ are mere statements of opinion rather than factual assertions.  Opinions are not subject to defamation claims, while false assertions of fact can be subject to defamation. The quote in Facebook’s complaint is ........To Read More...

Democrats turn down top lobbying roles at Facebook as scandals pile up

by Nihal Krishan, Technology Reporter | October 27, 2021

Facebook is reportedly struggling to hire Democrats for its lobbying shop in Washington despite paying top dollar, a potential sign that the social media behemoth is now deemed radioactive by many on the Left.

President Joe Biden's administration and Democrats in Congress have threatened to go after Facebook with aggressive regulations, lawsuits, and investigations, and that appears to be making it an unattractive employer for top talent. Making matters worse, some senior Democratic lobbyists have left the company recently, the Wall Street Journal reported...............To Read More......

 My Take - I'm not sure I understand this at all.  Didn't Zuckerberg do all he could to get Biden elected?   I will have to see more of this play out in the future.

In completely unsurprising news, Facebook employees hate conservatives

October 25, 2021 By Andrea Widburg

Conservatives who post on Facebook know that the site routinely censors their content. Now, though, whistleblowers are offering concrete proof confirming what conservatives have intuitively understood: One of the most important vehicles for modern communication has lots of employees who hate conservatives and their ideas.

Three things routinely happen to conservatives on Facebook: (1) Facebook rejects entirely something they post because it violates Facebook’s “community guidelines.” Efforts to get that decision reviewed always fail. (2) Facebook has allowed people to post something, only to slap it with a “disputed” or “fact checked” label. (3) There’s the infamous “sensitive content” label:............To Read More....

 

If you love Hitler, you can find a home on Twitter

May 28, 2021 By Eugene Veklerov 

According to CNN, "Facebook will no longer remove claims that Covid-19 was man-made. "Wonderful! Yet why did Facebook appropriate the right to be an arbiter in scientific disputes to begin with?  That is similar to AT&T eavesdropping on your phone conversations and interrupting them each time AT&T believes that you made an erroneous remark. 

To be fair, according to the same CNN article, Facebook took part in this scholarly dispute following "consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO)." That is the same WHO that has consistently provided cover for Chinese propaganda since the very beginning of the pandemic.

Twitter seems to impose its view of the world on the rest of us bolder than Facebook.  In October 2020, according to the Guardian:.......To Read More....

 

Twitter, Facebook Refuse to Remove Army of Chinese Propaganda Bots, Oxford Researchers Reveal.

Platforms including Twitter and Facebook are failing to suspend and label thousands of bot accounts linked to the Chinese Communist Party, according to a new investigation conducted by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute.

May 11, 2021 Natalie Winters

“A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, found that China’s rise on Twitter has been powered by an army of fake accounts that have retweeted Chinese diplomats and state media tens of thousands of times, covertly amplifying propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people — often without disclosing the fact that the content is government-sponsored,” the outlet summarizes.

The new report highlights how Twitter – a platform that’s quick to censor American conservatives – is slow to tackle Chinese Communist Party propaganda and manipulation of algorithms. “Twitter’s takedowns often came only after weeks or months of activity. All told, AP and the Oxford Internet Institute identified 26,879 accounts that managed to retweet Chinese diplomats or state media nearly 200,000 times before getting suspended. They accounted for a significant share – sometimes more than half — of the total retweets many diplomatic accounts got on Twitter,” the report noted.........To Read More.....

 

Facebook Used UN Speech Codes to Ban Trump

Daniel Greenfield  May 09, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 2018, the Trump administration pulled out of the United Nations Human Rights Council. That same year the administration cut funding to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) which had repeatedly attacked America and the Trump administration.

The administration dismissed these attacks as impotent, but the UN’s human rights apparatus had more power over Americans, including President Trump, than most people realized.

In 2012, the Rabat Plan of Action was born at a UN OHCHR conference in the Moroccan capital whose elected government was under the control of the Justice and Development Party, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, partly in response to Muslim outrage over “blasphemy” against Mohammed, and defined a program for censoring “hatred” and “incitement”.

In 2021, the Rabat Plan of Action along with other UN guidelines, was used by Facebook’s Oversight Board to justify the continued social media censorship of President Trump.

The social media monopoly which controls over 80% of social media traffic had outsourced its censorship to a board which used UN OHCHR speech guidelines to determine when Americans, including the President of the United States, could be censored.

The United States could try to defund OHCHR and pull out of the Human Rights Council, but the UN’s speech codes were already defining what Americans could say far more than anything in the American legal system. When Facebook’s Oversight Board issued its verdict on Trump, it did not cite a single item of United States law, including the First Amendment, but cited the Rabat Plan of Action, and articles of the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), OHCHR, a UN Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council, and the UN's International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

American law does not apply on Facebook. UN law does.

Libertarian and liberal critics of the campaign against Big Tech clamor that private companies are not governments, and have the right to censor anyone they please without falling afoul of the First Amendment. But when Big Tech monopolies that already control most online speech respond to state pressure from Democrat officials and their allied media outlets by imposing UN speech guidelines on Americans, including the President of the United States, that’s not private.

It’s state censorship by tech monopolies imposing rules created by foreign governments.

Michelle Bachelet, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, is Chile's former Socialist Party president who had spent years of exile in East Germany and who was backed by the Communist Party.

Prince Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, the son of the Lord Chamberlain of Jordan, Bachelet’s predecessor, had warned that President Trump’s words could lead to violence, and urged that “the conduct of the president should be under very careful scrutiny by the international community and by this office.” He also warned Facebook to “be thinking proactively”.

Facebook's Oversight Board includes Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark's former Prime Minister from its Social Democratic Party, and Catalina Botero Marino, the Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Expression. Facebook's Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications is former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

Director Thomas Hughes of the Oversight Board’s administrative staff formerly worked at UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, and for the European Commission, and was a member of the UK Foreign Secretary's Independent Advisory Group on Human Rights.

This is not private action.

Facebook can’t claim that it’s a private company and can determine what’s on its platform and then go ahead and use rules created by foreign governments and officials to censor Americans.

The Rabat Plan of Action, which Facebook’s Oversight Board used to justify the censorship of President Trump, declares that states are obliged to restrict speech that "amounts to incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence" citing ICCPR articles 19 and 20. The UN's ICCPR Article 19 allows restricting expression for "the reputations of others" and "public order". Article 20 orders a ban on "propaganda for war" and the "advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence."

These are a few of the various UN regulations, treaties, and conventions cited by Facebook’s Oversight Board. And while all this may sound like meaningless UN gibberish to most Americans, these UN rules define what you can and can’t say on the internet.

And what that means is that participating in the marketplace of ideas and in political campaigns in the United States is now subject to United Nations regulations through Silicon Valley.

Facebook’s Oversight Board, which is mostly non-American, does not take into account United States law. But neither is it a private enterprise that merely follows corporate guidelines.

American political speech on Facebook is being regulated by international law, not US law.

There is no longer a choice between regulating and not regulating Facebook. The Big Tech social media monopoly has called for regulation and has already accepted UN regulations.

The only remaining choice is whether Big Tech will follow US or UN laws.

When Facebook’s Oversight Board issues a ruling censoring the President of the United States using UN guidelines, that’s a fundamental conflict between the UN and the Constitution.

The only way to resolve that conflict is to force Big Tech to stop interfering with free speech.

Private companies have the right to remove calls for violence and other violations of their terms of service, but when a platform controls more than half the political speech in the country and actively discriminates against the views of half the country, that makes free speech a dead letter. Silicon Valley’s speech cartel has already colluded to suppress the political opposition, but it’s now applying UN regulations to American political speech and destroying the Bill of Rights.

The Founding Fathers did not envision a scenario in which a cartel of private companies could control the mail and eliminate all letters that were not loyal to the British Crown. The Supreme Court of the 1950s did not envision Ma Bell deciding to prevent Americans from making phone calls if their views clashed with those of the UN. But that’s the threat that has now arrived.

Woke companies aren’t just sending out emails or threatening boycotts, they’re eliminating the Bill of Rights and subjecting American political speech to the dictates of the United Nations.

This isn’t a clash between private enterprise and government officials, but a struggle between two governments, the legitimate government of the United States and the illegitimate umbrella association of tyrannies of the United Nations. If Big Tech and the UN prevail, freedom dies.

If American free speech doesn’t apply to the internet, United Nations speech regulations will.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Big Tech, recent, UN 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Meet Nick Clegg, a British nerd who decides what Americans can read on Facebook

By Kyle Smith May 6, 2021

Who is Sir Nick Clegg, the Facebook vice president of global affairs who is placing America’s culture of free speech in manacles by continuing to ban Donald Trump from the platform? The man who wrote the Facebook post barring Trump in January and will decide whether to make it permanent is a career British liberal politician, once famously described as David Cameron’s condom by Boris Johnson.

Savor this for a moment: The former head of a party calling itself the “Liberal Democrats,” from the supposedly liberty-loving homeland of the Magna Carta, is stopping Americans from hearing the thoughts of a person we chose as our president. What was the point of the American Revolution if some aristocratic British nerd can decide which Americans get to speak?

Clegg, 54, the former deputy prime minister of Great Britain until he was chased out of that country by haters on both sides, has fallen upwards into a much bigger job than he ever had in London, where as David Cameron’s No. 2 he had an exalted title but almost no power. Johnson, then the mayor, derided him as “Cameron’s kind of lapdog-come-prophylactic-protection device.”............To Read More.....

 

Facebook’s ‘oversight’ board that muzzled Trump is 75% composed of foreign nationals

By Thomas Lifson 

How is it that foreign nationals are in a position to prevent any American political figures, up to and including a former president, from communicating with fellow Americans? Yet, the mysterious semi-independent “Oversight” Board of Facebook is comprised of 20 people, only 5 of whom are Americans. Both co-chairs are foreigners.  Here is the board:..........

 Foreign interference in American elections? Hampering political speech seems like interference to me............To Read More....

•  Dr. Joseph Mercola provides a case study in how censorship works in America
•  Brent Bozell: Facebook ‘Gets Its First Opportunity to Interfere with the 2024 Election’
•  Outrage: Facebook becomes the central nexus of human-smuggling cartel operations, Florida congresswoman says
•  …Hostin: Upheld Trump Ban Because He Is ‘Still a Public Safety Threat’ 
• Facebook Permanently Blacklists Popular Pro-Life Website LifeSite News… 
• Republicans Ask: What’s to Stop Facebook from Silencing You Next?
•  Behar: Facebook Banning Trump Is Like Keeping Mussolini Off the Radio
• John Kennedy Compares Big Tech to ‘Bolsheviks’ — ‘We Need to Regulate Them’
• White House: Joe Biden Believes Social Media Platforms Should Block More ‘Untrustworthy Content’
• Trump: ‘Radical Left Lunatics’ of Facebook, Twitter, Google ‘Afraid of the Truth, But the Truth Will Come Out, Anyway’
• Facebook’s Trump Decision Could Be a Watershed Moment - Time for a Reckoning? “It is a sad day for America,” Meadows said during an appearance on FOX’s America’s Newsroom. “It’s a sad day for Facebook because I can tell you, a number of members of Congress are now looking at: Do they break up Facebook? Do they make sure that they don’t have a monopoly?”

Facebook Threatens to Censor Conservative Hodgetwins on Same Day NYT Laments Their Success

Allum Bokhari 28 Aug 2020

Facebook has threatened to blacklist the page of conservative comedy duo Kevin Hodge and Keith Hodge, better known as the Hodgetwins, on the same day that The New York Times identified them among the most successful conservative content creators on the platform.

The duo rose to fame on YouTube, where they amassed 1.4 million subscribers with viral videos. In 2018, they set up a second channel, “Conservative Twins,” focused on political content, which has accumulated over a million subscribers.  Their Facebook page is also enormously successful, with over 5.8 million followers and over 3.3 million likes.

Earlier today, the New York Times published an article lamenting the success of conservative content creators on Facebook, with the Hodgetwins featured as a prominent example.  The NYT complains that the two most popular posts about Black Lives Matter on the platform are videos from the Hodgetwins critiquing the movement:.........To Read More....
 

It's Time to Parler

By Rich Kozlovich

I belong to an eclectic e-mail group that discusses every social issue under the sun, daily. Some just read the comments, some contribute and comment regularly, some occasionally, and those who comment occasionally can be surprising with the comments.

But it's a closed forum with people who are direct, intelligent, knowledgeable and polite, and other than myself, they're all educated. I consider this to be a unique and special group, and lucky! Not often you can get that kind of interaction in such a diverse group. Of course we often disagree, but at some point we will disagree to the point there's nothing left but personal attacks, as we so often see in comments sections of online articles. and we're absolutely not going down that road, so we just walk away from it.

One of the latest issues that's come to the fore is Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and their publication policies.

Let's start here:

As Twitter checks Trump, Khamenei account left alone, despite plea from Israel

Comment from a member: Twitter, Google, Facebook, YouTube are all vile when it comes to their policies and actions on this sort of thing. They're blatantly bigoted, and grossly discriminating against conservatives, Jews, and Republicans. Not to mention seriously meddling in the upcoming election.

Breitbart News Appeals Twitter Account Suspension, ‘Review’ Drags Out Beyond 48 Hours

Twitter Suspends PragerU, Prominent Conservatives, and Doctors for Commenting on HCQ

Comment from a member:  This is truly outrageous.  Now twitter, google, YouTube etc., thinks that they are doctors who somehow have the right to say what people can and cannot hear about a treatment in the middle of a pandemic.  Because, of course, we're too stupid to decide for ourselves with our real doctors what we do or do not want to try or do for a possibly deadly condition.

Over the years there's been a lot of discussion over this, but the question really is what can be done about this? I think it’s blatantly obvious LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are in no way impartial.  They're now part of the left wing media conspiracy, and their goal is to destroy conservatives, Christians, Republicans, Jews, Israel and whites. 

So what?  No matter how outraged I might become over this I still contend it's their right to be stupid.   This is America, we have a right to be stupid, it’s Constitutional!  We have more kinds of stupidity here than any nation on the Earth!   Why?   Because we have a system that permits it, and an economy that allows for that kind of commitment, no matter how stupid.   This is unlike other nations.  Especially those dominated by Muslims.  The only kind of stupid they’re allowed to embrace is Islam.  Any other kind of stupid, or even any kind of intelligent for that matter, gets you killed.  

But my big bone of contention with these people is they’re dishonest, just like the rest of the left wing media, whether it’s TV, magazines, newspapers or Hollywood for that matter.  The difference is no one can tell these news sources what they can or cannot print.  Who they support or who they hate.  Why should we think we can do it with these groups? Admittedly, they're not the press, and so the argument is they have no First Amendment protection.  Really? I'm not so sure that's a slippery slope. 

In decades gone by I really liked the way newspapers worked.  Many, many decades ago.  They were openly partisan.  They would call themselves the name of the city and who they supported.  Such as the New Haven Republican, or the New Haven Democrat, etc.  Those names are made up by the way,  but that was the trend.  You knew where they were from and where they stood.

Now the main stream media is finally coming out into the open and demonstrating their corruption, and so too should these social media sites.  And once they've done that, leave them alone.  I’ve contended what needs to be done is develop competition with these openly left wing lunatics with an openly conservative site, or at the very least an honest open dialogue site.  And now there is one, and it’s called Parler!  But get this.  Conservatives can be an odd lot.   Parler isn't attracting conservatives as it should. Why?

One conservative writer I personally know complained that posting on Parler was like preaching to the choir, and a waste of time.   Does anyone really think posting on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook will change the thinking of leftist ideologues to any real degree, and is a better use of time?

Preaching to the choir is a good thing because it provides information conservatives can use to support  their own views, challenge opposing views, and do it intelligently.  Also, it makes it clear to conservatives they're not alone, and that the social sea they're swimming in is filled with intelligent, reasonable and rational people.  That's an excellent use of time!

By the way, it amazes me how often I can search for something on Google but it won't show up, clearly they're orchestrating what can be found.  All the Breitbart articles I linked suffered that kind of fate.  So I often use Quant as my search engine, and it never fails to deliver. 

Facebook Puts Soros, Muslim Brotherhood, Activists in Charge of Censorship

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Facebook controls as much as 80% of social media traffic. That means that it has the power to erase conversations, shift narratives, and control how people speak to one another.

Facebook controls as much as 80% of social media traffic. That means that it has the power to erase conversations, shift narratives, and control how people speak to one another. With 190 million users in the United States, the social network monopoly has more control over what people see than all of the media giants combined do. And now Facebook is putting some very troubling political activists in charge of its Oversight Board who will decide how it censor.

“You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world,” Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg had described the Board.

What does Facebook’s Supreme Court of Censorship look like when you zoom in?

Only a quarter of the Oversight Board originates from the United States. That means three quarters of the censorship court comes from countries with no First Amendment. While people from outside the United States may believe in certain kinds of free speech, political speech in this country will be determined by a majority Third World board of left-leaning political activists.

And even there the balance is curiously tilted.

3 members of the 20 member board are Muslim or come from Muslim countries. Only one board member is Hindu. Considering that there are approximately 1.1 billion Hindus and 1.8 billion Muslims, the Facebook Oversight Board favors Muslim countries at the expense of Hindus.

Considering the pressure by Islamists and their allies to censor India’s Hindu political movements and civil rights organizations combating Islamic violence, this is troubling.

The Oversight Board also has only one Asian member for around 1.8 billion people.

Of the 3 Muslim nationals, Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy has noted that Tawakkol Karman was a top leader in a Muslim Brotherhood linked group with ties to Al Qaeda.

“The Brotherhood is a movement fighting for freedom," Karman wrote of the organization whose leaders have called for the murder of Jews and whose history includes Nazi collaboration.

“Because it is an integral part of this region, the Brotherhood is the one who will rule Riyadh and Abu Dhabi," she even predicted.

Facebook has added an Islamist who believes that a theocracy will rule the region, and put her in charge of determining content moderation policies for the entire planet. A member aligned with a violently bigoted organization will help Facebook police “hate speech”.

What will happen to ex-Muslims and secular activists in Muslim countries under this setup?

These numbers make it clear that the Board is not proportional by population, and despite its international makeup, reflects the political agendas of Facebook’s left-leaning leadership.

The first member, in alphabetical order, is a program manager at the Open Society Initiative, a part of the George Soros global political empire of NGOs. There is no indication that the Soros employee will be stepping down from her role so that, despite previous clashes with the radical billionaire, George Soros will effectively control a seat on Facebook’s Oversight Board.

At least.

Andras Sajo has held positions in Open Society organizations, including on the Board of Directors of the Open Society Justice Initiative and is allegedly an old friend of Soros.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt sits on the Board of Trustees of Soros' International Crisis Group along with the extremist billionaire and his son.

Maina Kiai sits on the Advisory Board for the Human Rights Initiative of Soros' Open Society Foundations.

Sudhir Krishnaswamy also appears to have benefited from an Open Society grant. This is not unusual considering that the Oversight Board is weighed heavily toward NGOs with members from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Even dismissing members who have only appeared at Soros events or made use of grants from Soros organizations, four Oversight Board members are deeply involved in Soros organizations. And Soros has made his hostility to free speech, and his conviction that conservatives must be censored, abundantly clear.

Soros has demanded that Facebook "should be held accountable for the content that appears on its site" and complained that the company "fails to adequately punish those who spread false information.” Will Oversight Board members who work for Soros or sit on the boards of his organizations protect free speech or support the billionaire’s crusade to censor the opposition?

If the Oversight Board is going to be the final determinative body for Facebook censorship, why stack it with so many professional human rights activists who are not lawyers or professors? Courts don’t invite in activists to issue rulings. That’s because activists come with agendas. And their agendas may involve empowerment, but usually for a small and narrowly defined group.

They are also rarely independent, but often funded by billionaires with their own agendas.

But even the Oversight Board’s academic members can be as repressive as a Soros.

Nicolas Suzor had written that "neutrality" on social media platforms is "causing problems" and that "neutral tools that do not actively take inequality into account will almost inevitably contribute to the amplification of inequality." He even suggested that dissent from the Left's global warming positions could also be viewed as dangerous. "Racism, misogyny, and bigotry, anti-vaccination content, misinformation, self-harm, and climate change denial — all require difficult judgments about when one person’s speech is harmful to others."

In a Twitter exchange, a prof argued that, "many of the most controversial content moderation decisions are about leave-ups. Think: Pelosi video, hate speech in Myanmar, Alex Jones... not having this in scope for the Board from the start is a huge… Oversight." Suzor replied that, "totally agree that expanding the scope as soon as we can is really important."

That should worry anyone whose speech might one day fall afoul of the Soroses and Suzors.

Dubious claims that some form of speech is dangerous have been used to justify crackdowns by social media giants on everything from pro-life views to support for conservative candidates. The current wave of censorship has been justified by insisting that conservative speech is either a product of foreign disinformation (the Russia hoax), that it’s medically dangerous (suppression of political protests, dissent on coronavirus policy, or opposition to abortion), or that any speech offensive to an identity politics group causes inequality and psychological harm.

Combine the three together and they add up to censoring any political speech the Left opposes.

And, as Michael Moore’s censorship by environmentalists shows, not even career leftists are immune from the Orwellian political orthodoxy that brands some views anathema overnight.

(That is why leftists might want to reconsider their abandonment of liberalism before it’s too late. History shows that the ideology most likely to purge lefties for ideological dissent is the Left.)

Facebook set up the Oversight Board to outsource its censorship while evading responsibility for its repression. The dot com giant wants to be a monopoly that has a stranglehold on the marketplace of ideas, but it doesn’t want to be open to the marketplace’s diversity of ideas.

That is the totalitarian fallacy of most of the Big Tech giants who want users on their terms.

Stacking the board with Soros cronies and assorted human rights activists, digital experts, and the other sorts of people who spend all their time appearing on panels and giving TED talks, is how Big Tech companies have their censorship cake and eat it too. After this, when conservatives complain about Facebook censorship, it won’t be Mark Zuckerberg’s fault.

But it will be.

The Oversight Board, like most Facebook initiatives, is rigged from the ground up. It contains a few token libertarians, but is tilted toward lefties. It contains an Islamist, but hardly anyone likely to advocate for the values of traditional Christians and Jews. Behind the facade of international diversity, the Supreme Court of Censorship has very little intellectual or religious diversity.

Two libertarian/conservative establishment figures don’t balance out eight lefties just as bringing in an Israeli leftist does not balance out a Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood figure. Giving Soros four seats and Koch one is not only rigging the game, but failing to address the real issues at stake.

The social media giant is responding to pressure to censor conservative views, especially in the US, the UK, Israel, Latin America, Myanmar, and India, yet has no representatives of the sorts of people who are likely to be censored. Instead it stacked the deck with those likely to censor.

Where are the Trump supporters, the Modi backers, the Bolsonaro fans, the Zionists, the Buddhist monks of Myanmar, or any group that dissents from the Left on any major issue?

Of the groups likely to be censored, only the Islamists get their own representative at Facebook.

The Supreme Court of Censorship is rigged in favor of the censors and against the censored.

Facebook has assembled a grab bag of globalist personalities that wouldn’t be out of place at a UN conference (and a number have worked at or for the UN in some capacity) and put them in charge of determining what can be said by billions of people around the world.

And by countless millions in the United States of America.

The United States is tasked with protecting the essential freedoms of its citizens from interference by its government, by foreign governments, or by any force so powerful that it can singly blot out any of the Bill of Rights. The Big Tech monopolies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook pose a unique threat to the unalienable rights among which are, "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", for whose protection, "Governments are instituted among Men."

This is the role that Jefferson envisioned for government in the Declaration of Independence.

Governments wield power by the “consent of the governed” who can vote and remove any government. Facebook would like us to think that its powers to censor will derive from a bunch of globalist NGO activists and lefty law professors. No individual or group has the power to stop Facebook’s monopoly over social media. It has become too rich and powerful.

Only our government can fulfill its role by restoring our freedom to speak and be heard.

Otherwise all political speech that is not of the Left will be erased from the public square. If there were any doubt about that, Facebook’s Supreme Court of Censorship has settled it.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

Protests Under Coronavirus are Dangerous and Illegal... Unless They're by Lefties

Daniel Greenfield


On Monday, April 21st, members of National Nurses United (NNU), a radical union that advocates for socialized medicine, gathered outside the White House to protest against President Trump.

Video of the protest was carried on Facebook Live by the same dot com monopoly which had banned ‘Reopen’ protests as being harmful. After the rally, protesters clumped together with reporters, and there was no social distancing in sight. Despite that Facebook did not take down the NUN page.

And the media celebrated the protesters. "Nurses protest unsafe conditions in front of White House," CBS News headlined its coverage. "We're Beyond Angered," the Washington Post blared.

“We’re feeling like martyrs,” MSNBC shrilled.

There wasn’t even a hint of a suggestion that a protest was inappropriate under lockdown. Especially by a group that is at far more risk of spreading the virus than any of the shuttered small businesses.

The White House protest was one of multiple NNU protests around the country, some thinly disguised as ‘vigils’ or concerns over PPE, but ultimately a larger push for a socialized medicine takeover.

But it wasn’t just protests by health care workers that benefited from a political double standard.

In the same weeks as the ‘Reopen’ protests against state lockdowns and for reopening businesses were taking place, a parallel series of protests against President Trump were also happening across America.

Police cracked down on the ‘reopen’ protests, arresting an organizer in New Jersey, while the media condemned them, spun conspiracy theories trying to tie them to members of the Trump administration, and falsely accused protesters of causing an increase in coronavirus in Kentucky.

Facebook deleted protest groups in coordination with state governments, labeling the protests, illegal.

Blue state governments, dot com overlords, and the media all warned that protesting in the age of the coronavirus was dangerous and illegal. Even if the protesters were in cars or maintaining social distance.

But meanwhile Refuse Fascism, a radical leftist organization created by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, was holding its own anti-Trump protests with no interference from the authorities.

And no negative coverage from the media.

While New Jersey State cops had arrested the organizer of the ‘Reopen’ protest in Trenton, the Philadelphia Inquirer described members of Refuse Fascism Philly, at least one of them outfitted in 'Handmaid' garb, driving to dump fake body bags at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey while "police officers wearing respirators monitored the peaceful demonstration" and made no arrests.

The paper, which has blasted the "reopen' protests, offered positive coverage of the anti-Trump protest.

The Communist organization’s Facebook site, including links to its protest and photos from the event, is still standing. The social media giant has refused to take it down the way it has ‘Reopen’ sites.

While Facebook has claimed that it views protests during the coronavirus lockdown era as illegal, it is treating protests against the lockdown where conservatives wave American flags very differently than it does protests against President Trump by Communist activists. The patriots are banned from Facebook while the Communists are welcome. The political bias is unmistakable and the agenda is all too clear.

Facebook isn’t banning protests during the coronavirus lockdowns. It’s banning conservative protests.

The local CBS affiliate in Chicago covered a protest by Refuse Fascism on April 18th and offered no criticism of the irresponsible behavior of going out to dump body bags outside a Trump building at a time when everyone is being told to stay home to avoid spreading the virus.

SFBay covered both the reopen protests and a Refuse Fascism protest in front of the San Francisco Federal Building, condemning the former, while writing positively about the latter. Bloomberg whitewashed the Communists protesters as “critics of Trump’s slow response to the crisis”.

There was no media condemnation of the Refuse Fascism protests, even when they took place at Trump Tower or in Times Square in New York City, the city hardest hit by the pandemic. Or, as the Communist organization put it, “In the midst of the #Covid-19 virus, Refuse Fascism did this action in Times Square.”

The sight of protesters dumping body bags outside Trump properties and federal buildings was an effective piece of street theater. What is curious is how only a handful of media outlets covered it.

Much of the country has been locked down. Countless Americans have lost their jobs and their hope.

The media is well aware that the sight of resistance hipsters parading around with body bags and protest signs might be infuriating at a time when the country is going through a national trauma. And so the media has made a selective choice not to cover protests that it knows quite well are taking place.

This coverup has been conducted at the same time as it has hatefully covered the Reopen rallies.

The smears of the Reopen rallies serve the media’s political agenda, while covering the Refuse Fascism rallies would not. The media doesn’t oppose the Communist rallies, it just understands that even the people who repeat back everything the media tells them might pick up on the hypocrisy of accusing Reopen protesters of spreading coronavirus and endangering their states while cheering the Commies.

While the media has played down lefty protests in this country, it has been more enthusiastic abroad.

When lefties rallied against Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel, the media cheered. "Israelis Just Showed the World What a Socially Distant Protest Looks Like," Time gushed. "This is what a socially distant protest looks like," CNN smirked. There was nothing safe about 2,000 radicals crowding into Kings of Israel Square, with the overflow spreading into nearby streets, while synagogue prayers are restricted.

Israel’s Netanyahu is a longtime media hate object and the media supports the protests against him. And it’s safe to promote protests in Israel that won’t affect or infuriate Americans under lockdown.

The double standard on anti-Trump and anti-lockdown protests by the media, by Facebook, and by state authorities is evidence of bias, of discrimination, and of selectively censoring political speech.

New Jersey arrested a Reopen protest organizer while letting Communists protest as they liked. Her real crime was ‘protesting while conservative’ under Governor Murphy’s post-Bill of Rights regime.

The pandemic is being used as a pretext by blue governments and by Facebook to silence conservatives.

If leaving the house to go to church or to play catch is a public health hazard, why have the authorities allowed the National Nurses United and Refuse Fascism protests to continue without tickets or fines?

If a protesting is a public health threat, as Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg insists, why is his platform continuing to host videos of Refuse Fascism and National Nurses United protesting in public?

The wholesale suppression of the First Amendment by governments and dot com monopolies would be bad enough. But the suppression is selective. As it always has been long before the pandemic arrived.

If you’re protesting against President Trump, the authorities won’t touch you. But if you gather to demand the right to reopen your small business, they will fine you and even arrest you.

And Facebook will delete any attempt to organize peaceful protests by small business owners waving American flags, while hosting protest content from Communists who want to destroy America.

These are not pandemic precautions. The crackdown on the Reopen rallies is political persecution.

It is up to Attorney General Barr and the DOJ to stand up for the civil rights of the people being arrested, fined, threatened, and censored, not because of the coronavirus, but because they are conservatives.

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Facebook Co-Founder: Punish Facebook for Not Stopping Trump

By Jason Mester| May 17th, 2019

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is upset that the social media platform didn’t do more to stop the rise of Donald Trump, and he’s calling for the company to be broken up and regulated in hopes of preventing a repeat of the 2016 election.

Hughes’s main regret is not that his former company censors the Right—it’s that Facebook didn’t start aggressively targeting conservatives long ago........The first point is out in the open; it’s basically the thesis of the article: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, other social media giants—and, by extension, the Silicon Valley monopolies in general—have an unbelievable amount of power over our lives and our public discourse.........

Social media is the modern public square. The power to censor social media is the power to shape ideas. The power to “deplatform” dissidents from social media is the power to silence their voices.
Hughes didn’t much care about any of that until he realized that free speech online helped Donald Trump become president of the United States.............To Read More.......

Facebook Targets Michelle Malkin: Gives Pass to Antifa

Michelle censored for protesting censorship.

by Jeffrey Lord May 17, 2019

 

And there they go again.

 

Facebook has censored Michelle Malkin — for protesting censorship. Meanwhile, as noted in this space just last week, Facebook has no problem with the pro-fascist and deliberately misnamed “Antifa” — the pro-fascist group that pretends its use of hooded faces and clubs is somehow “anti-fascist.” Here is the link to AntifaUSA and their masked faces as they appear on Facebook.

 

Take a good look at Antifa’s favored appearance of black ski masks and recall another leftist group — this one that historians describe as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”

 

Ahh, the more things change the more they stay the same — from the Klan to Antifa the far-left specializes in hiding its faces to enable its acts of hatred and violence.  And what specifically was Michelle Malkin censored for? Here, courtesy of Breitbart, is the tweet that got her censored:............To Read More....

Facebook Escalates Its War Against Non-Leftists

May 3, 2019 Michael J. Hurd

Imagine if Donald Trump owned Facebook. Now let’s say he decided to eliminate all “extremists” from the platform. Yet the only “extremists” eliminated are on the left; none are on the right. Ilhan Omar, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and that type — they’d all be gone. In fact, if you tried to post to their websites, you’d get banned yourself.   This is precisely what Facebook has done. Yet nobody seems to care, except for the people affected............. To Read More....

Sicko, Southern Border-Style

April 12, 2019 By Brian C. Joondeph

Sicko is one of Michael Moore’s many movies, focusing on the U.S. health care system, costs, the uninsured, and the usual liberal talking points. Despite his many criticisms of U.S. health care, when Moore was sick with pneumonia, he chose hospitalization in a New York City hospital rather than in one of those countries with a supposedly far better health care system, say, Cuba.

He could make a sequel to Sicko, this time focusing on the southern border of the U.S. and the hordes of sick men, women, and children invading America, bringing all sorts of exotic diseases on top of the many other problems they bring, including crime. These diseases are making many Americans sicko.

It’s more than simply lice or scabies, annoying conditions, but hardly a mortal threat to Americans. Instead it’s contagious diseases that we haven’t heard much about in decades or since many of us were afflicted as children. These diseases are making the news, but as predictable as sunrise and sunset, the media and government officials are at a loss to explain the resurgence of these mostly once-eradicated conditions............. Read more