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Censorship online by Big Tech is a bad idea, in large part because its a distraction from the problem of how social media companies promote, spread and amplify harmful information, according to author Peter Pomerantsev.

Its ridiculous to think that you can regulate the billions of things people say every day, or that we should, or that its even feasible. So I dont think thats the way forward, Pomerantsev said in an interview on The Long Game, a Yahoo News podcast. Therell be a way to get out of the whole tricky thing of taking one comment down or leaving it up.

The way out, he said, is through forcing the tech companies to be transparent about how they are manipulating the spread of information, and holding them accountable to prevent public harms.

Pomerantsev is a Russian-born journalist now based in London whose parents were hounded by the KGB secret police in Soviet Russia. His book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality argues that phrases like freedom of expression have been hacked by authoritarian leaders and governments like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

Authoritarians use freedom of speech as an excuse to spread massive amounts of disinformation at the click of a button, while employing online mobs and troll farms to drown out and intimidate critical voices and obscure truth. This constitutes a sort of censorship through noise, Pomerantsev and two others wrote in a recent article for the London School of Economics Institute of Global Affairs, where he is a visiting senior fellow.

But countering autocrats doesnt have to mean removing the posts of ordinary people or taking them off their preferred social media platforms, he said, which has become a growing concern among many Republicans.

We thought that for a long time, the federal government is infuriating, Tucker Carlson said on Fox News Wednesday. The bigger threat to your family turned out to be huge publicly held corporations, particularly the tech monopolies.

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In fact, focus on censorship and cancel culture actually distracts from solving the problem of disinformation and all the chaos and confusion and real-world harm it brings with it in a way that preserves free speech, Pomerantsev said.

A lot of the virality is amplified artificially. Thats kind of how a lot of these platforms were designed, he said. That kind of artificial amplification I think really has to end.

Fake amplification everything from gaming algorithms and search engine optimization through to amplification through coordinated inauthentic activity I think that probably has to end if the internet is going to be a just reflection of society and not this kind of weird funhouse mirror that distorts everything, Pomerantsev said.

One of the first steps toward reducing disinformation is algorithm transparency: revealing how the social media and Big Tech companies engineer which information rises to the top and is seen by large numbers of people. Google, Facebook and TikTok have all taken some recent steps in this direction, Axios reported this week, but it was voluntary and most experts think this issue needs to be overseen by government regulators.

When Trumps people would say, Google pushes conservative views right down, liberal news up, we dont know because Google has not shown anyone its formulas that shape search results, Pomerantsev said. Thats ridiculous.

Carlson addressed the same root cause on his show. Twitter refuses to release data on who it bans, he said.

Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., and Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., sent letters to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in late January urging the companies to address the fundamental design features of their social networks that facilitate the spread of extreme, radicalizing content to their users. The letters were co-signed by 38 other House Democrats.

The lawmakers drew a straight line between the focus of social media companies on maximizing user engagement and the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters who believed the former presidents lies about the 2020 election.

The rioters who attacked the Capitol earlier this month were radicalized in part in digital echo chambers that these platforms designed, built, and maintained, and that the platforms are partially responsible for undermining our shared sense of objective reality, for intensifying fringe political beliefs, for facilitating connections between extremists, leading some of them to commit real-world, physical violence, Malinowski and Eshoo wrote.

The lawmakers cited a Wall Street Journal investigation from last May that revealed Facebook knew in 2018 that its algorithms sometimes radicalized its users, but did not take action to reduce this because it would reduce profits. Our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness, a presentation created internally said, noting that the company was serving more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.

Malinowski and Eshoo have proposed a change to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act a law targeted for reform by conservatives as well that would hold tech companies accountable for content they proactively promote for business reasons, if doing so leads to specific offline harms.

Malinowski said in a hearing this week that this is a solution that Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on. We can believe that the biggest problem is on the right, on the far right or on the far left it doesnt matter. We can debate that. Whichever of those things you believe you should be for this, because the mechanism works the same way. It pushes people on the left further left. It pushes people on the right further right, until they reach an extreme.

Pomerantsev pointed to the United Kingdoms approach, which says in his words that companies have to think about the harms they cause, and those harms could be around public health or some forms of personal abuse.

And the question is what are the companies doing almost like in a health and safety kind of regime to mitigate that? So are their algorithms making it too easy for people to bully others or to harass them? Pomerantsev said. Are the way their systems are designed making it too easy to spread this information thats dangerous to peoples health?

The British have said there needs to be a regulator thats making a judgment about whether theyre doing enough around those issues, and are working to set up a system in which Ofcom, its communications regulator, could issue fines if the companies are found at fault.

The tech companies have lobbied the British government against giving Ofcom punitive regulatory powers.

But as Pomerantsev wrote in his book and expounded on in his interview with Yahoo News, the Big Tech companies have acquired so much information about their users which is most people that there is a real question about whether they are infringing upon freedom of thought.

To some degree our private thoughts, creative impulses, and senses of self are shaped by information forces greater than ourselves, he wrote in This Is Not Propaganda.

Are they actually invading your freedom of thought? Are they actually crossing the line of you, and then using it against you? he said. What is that line of our unconscious that deserves to be protected?

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To avoid online censorship, government must force Big Tech to be more transparent, expert says - Yahoo News

The ongoing drive to impose online political censorship of the left has become clearer over the past week following remarks by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the social media platform was being depoliticized.

Speaking during a fourth-quarter earnings call with investors on January 28, Zuckerberg said the company was working on methods to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed. He said that Facebook was continuing to fine-tune how this works and we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and we plan to expand that policy globally.

While individuals, pages and groups have been ostensibly blocked, banned or deleted for violating community standards in the past, Zuckerberg said the ongoing efforts to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities would include groups that we may not want to encourage people to join even if they dont violate our policies.

Zuckerbergs remarks were in part a response to a letter he received on January 21 from Democratic Representatives Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Anna Eshoo of California that blamed Facebook for presenting users with content most likely to reinforce their existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear, and for using algorithms that undermine our shared sense of objective reality, intensify fringe political beliefs, facilitate connections between extremist users.

Malinowski and Eshoo praised Facebooks decision before the 2020 elections to stop recommending that users join political and social issue groups and denounced the lifting of these restrictions before the Georgia run-off election, which caused a spike in partisan political content and a decline in authoritative news sources in users newsfeeds.

While it may appear that Zuckerberg and the Democrats are responding to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by a fascist mob incited by Donald Trump in a coup attempt aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 elections, their choice of words is significant. They do not refer to the far-right, fascists, neo-Nazis, militia groups and others who include in their ranks leading members of the Republican Party, law enforcement officers and active and retired US military representatives.

The reference to divisive conversation, turning down the temperature, fringe political beliefs and extremist users, make it clear that the effort to shut down political dialogue on social media is aimed at silencing left-wing and socialist politics and preventing the working class from using Facebook to organize its struggles against the capitalist system.

In comments to Politico on January 29, Rep. Malinowski elaborated on his vision of political censorship when he said did not care about how the depoliticization of Facebook would impact political organizing of progressive and left groups on the platform, as long as these new rules apply to everybody equally. He added, Access to Facebook for campaigns is a nice thing to have, but it's not necessary for democracy to function. There are a lot of ways to reach voters.

A similar line of argument was advanced by the right-wing Wall Street J ournal in a major article published on January 31 entitled, Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued Groups, Now Plans Overhaul.

After the Journal makes the lying claim that the Capitol riot was the product of hyper-partisanship, the article goes on to say that the proliferation of extremist groups on Facebook was to blame. Instead of focusing on a defeated President seeking to overthrow the US constitution by mobilizing a fascist mob against Congress, the Journal presents the views of Nina Jankowicz, a social media researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote that Facebook groups were destroying American democracy.

That the real target of the effort to shut down Facebook groups is the political left comes out when the Journal says Facebook conducted an investigation in August 2020 of US groups tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities using platform tools to build large audiences. Most of the Groups were on the right end of the political spectrum, but Suburban Housewives Against Trump appeared near the top of the charts, too, the August presentation said. Conservative or liberal, the Groups shared a common thread: They had harnessed passionate super-users and Facebook recruitment tools to achieve viral growth.

Facebooks reduction of politics in the news feed policy has been identified as a far-reaching attack on democratic rights by free speech advocate Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the advocacy group Free Press. Karr told Politico that Facebook should be able to address concerns about amplification of the far-right without hurting civic-minded groups.

Facebook has the ability to fix its recommendation algorithm to exclude white supremacist, militia and conspiracy groups still in its midst, and to do it without harming well-intentioned organizations that are using its platform to organize, Karr said. This isnt rocket science.

It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accountsincluding the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the USby Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy.

Fear of growing opposition in the working class to government policiesespecially the response to the COVID-19 pandemicand against the rise of the fascist right is a critical aspect of the plans to shut down political discussion on social media and block algorithms from promoting left and socialist groups in the news feed of users.

Workers and young people must demand that socialist groups and political discussion about the threat of fascist dictatorship on social media be defended. No confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party to do anything about the danger to democratic rights represented by the January 6 attempted coup by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party.

The way to defeat the far right is not by shutting down political dialogue online but by utilizing these tools as instruments in the struggle to educate and organize the international working class in the struggle against the capitalist systemthe source of the fascist menaceand for socialism on a world scale.

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Facebook's depoliticization aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations - WSWS

One of the most popular arguments to despise horror films and related genres in their most violent and explicit incarnations is that they can inspire atrocities in real life. It's a thought as old as the films with Lon Chaney and remains in force to this day: just remember all the controversy generated by Joker and the Death Wish remake before their premieres.

If we talk about extreme measures against extreme films, what happened in the United Kingdom during the Margaret Tatcher years is fundamental. The explosion of the video market in the eighties changed the way of watching cinema forever. "Children can rewind and watch those scenes over and over again," says a character in Censor, a film set precisely in those years, when 72 movies on video, called video nasties, caused mass hysteria and harsh censorship.

Censor, the debut feature by British filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond, joins the long tradition of cinema about cinema, this time from a very particular point of view: that of the censors. Enid (Niamh Algar) is responsible for deciding which images should be cut from some slasher/cannibal movie or, depending on the case, if they should be banned. Not all of her colleagues are as strict, one of them, for example, quotes Un chien andalou to defend a scene where someone's eye is gouged out, which Enid wants to remove.

But let's not get confused, she always tries to do her job in the best way, with responsibility and objectivity. It's evident that she doesn't like this type of cinema, usually made by men and with women as the main victims. She ironically calls them "masterpieces."This doesn't mean that she wants to censor everything, her seriousness allows her to differentiate between over-the-top gore and more realistic violence.

Enid can't overcome a trauma from her past: when she was a child, her sister Nina disappeared while they were strolling in a forest. Enid suffered amnesia, preventing her from contributing to the recapitulation of the events. Confronting the reality that developments in the case had stagnated, her parents decided to stop waiting for a miraculous happy ending, accepting that they would never see Nina again. When they receive the newly-issued death certificate, the parents took the opportunity to move on, even though Enid was unwilling to accept the terrible ending. Guilt still overwhelms the protagonist.

Censor explores that moment when fiction affects reality... at least in appearance. Although Enid is not a filmmaker, she's pointed out as one of the responsible people when the hysteria grows because the press connects the characteristics of a real crime with one of the horror films within the film: Deranged, notorious for a sequence in which a murderer eats the face of his victim, a scene approved by Enid and another colleague.

Likewise, the protagonist's harsh past increasingly controls her head. Reality reminds her of the tragedy: the killer supposedly inspired by Deranged declares to have amnesia and, in the midst of the scandal, she falls prey to guilt again. Fiction evokes her sister: another film within the film, Don't Go in the Church, appears to be directly based on Nina's disappearance. Not to mention when, playing detective, she discovers Asunder, a forbidden video nasty that shares a director with Dont Go in the Church andfeatures an actress that looks like her sister.

Censor creates its own mythology. It mitxes real movies for example, sequences from Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer with fictional titles: Cannibal Carnage, a banned tape that video stores rent clandestinely (there's an extremely funny interaction between Enid and a clerk), derives from the Italian subgenre led by Cannibal Holocaust. These details make noticeablethe director's taste for genre cinema of that time. It's quite enjoyable.

Like other similar contemporary films Knife + Heart, to name one Censor draws on the genre cinema that it's referencing, specifically the giallo style. Dream sequences and saturated colors represent Enid's mind and her downward spiral on screen. Censor intersperses reality with the oneiric, bordering on the nightmarish, playing with the link between the real and the fictitious.

The film explores how her protagonist goes deeper and deeper into the world of video nasties (she meets a producer, "acts" in the sequel to Don't Go in the Church), as well as real-life violence and horror. Censor doesn't fall into nonsense; everything is linked to a personal trauma and her conviction that the creators of Dont Go in the Church are true criminals that leads to delirium.

Reality and fiction, even though they have an undeniable connection, are not the same. Censor remarks on it on several occasions, similar to the Canadian 1980 filmDeadline. We hear, for instance, that the amnesic killer didn't even know about the video nasty Deranged!

In its memorable and brutal climax, the separation is marked by the change in the aspect ratio of the images. At that point Enid no longer distinguishes. And when she finally seems to wake up from that "trance," she prefers fiction over the horrors of reality and imagines herself as a vengeful movie heroine.

She prefers the miraculously happy ending. She even believes that the demonization of video nasties worked, that they were all banned and consequently the evils of British society eradicated. Her last fantasy is a poignant and satirical comment that works for that time and today.

A version in Spanish of this review was also published at Cinema Inferno

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Sundance 2021 Review: CENSOR, The Danger Of Confusing Fiction With Reality - ScreenAnarchy

That is all right. I had them on my list, too, a prominent public figure joked after learning that he had been blacklisted by a political opponent.

Who said this? Was it Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., after Simon and Schuster canceled his book deal because he challenged the Electoral College results from Pennsylvania, even though Democrats had similarly objected in 2001, 2005, and 2017?

Was it a Trump administration official responding to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs call to blacklist and deny them future employment?

Was it black conservative radio host Larry Elder after Hollywood censored his documentary Uncle Tom, whose IMDB rating of 8.9 surpasses 9 of the past 10 Oscar winners for Best Documentary?

How about someone responding to veteran journalist Katie Courics call to deprogram Trump supporters?

Or My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, after Twitter banned him along with thousands of conservatives, including former President Donald Trump? Or Newmax reporter Emerald Robinsons response to CNNs call to cancel Newsmax?

No. That is all right. I had them on my list, too, was the response of David Low, a prominent British cartoonist, when he learned in 1945 that his name was one of 2,300 Britons on Adolf Hitlers blacklist. Had Hitler captured England, the Gestapo was to arrest those on the list.

No sector of English society or political opinion was spared from Hitlers British blacklist. The Gestapo targeted Jews in England, members of Parliament, executives and employees of more than 170 British firms, dozens of university professors, members of 400 social clubs and organizations, and journalists at 35 media outlets.

Censorship and blacklisting are the hallmarks of an unfree society. The Third Reich seized power in Germany in 1933 and immediately began controlling newspapers, radio, and films through censorship. Books were banned and burned.

Censorship was also a tactic used by Soviet Russia. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, one of their first acts was to issue the Decree on Press to ban articles critical of their authority. Based on real-life experiences with censorship and other horrors in communist Russia, George Orwell wrote his book 1984 in 1949 to warn the West against totalitarianism. Today Chinas Communist Party uses the Great Firewall to block news and online information from its citizens.

Todays speech punishments by Twitter, Facebook, Hollywood, corporations, and book publishers against Americans are obviously not equal to the mass casualty horrors of totalitarian governments. A direct comparison is not the point here. Its to point out that certain tools are hallmarks of repressive societies that a society that aspires to be free should not emulate, even faintly.

Censorship and blacklisting are serious unjust cultural acts that increasingly filter Americans into second-class citizens based on their political viewpoints. The censorship and blacklisting that we are seeing in America right now is viewpoint discrimination. Censorship and blacklisting need to be fully rejected by American society before they become accepted cultural norms that make even worse injustices likely and more possible.

It was censorship that gave birth to free-speech advocacy in America and fostered the conditions for our nations unique First Amendment, which legally protects unpopular speech. After his brother was thrown in jail for publishing a newspaper in 1722the new social media of the eraBenjamin Franklin wrote a series of articles under a fake name, Silence Dogood.He had to hide his identity because he didnt truly have free speech.

His wise words are fitting for todays threats: Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

Censorship and blacklisting are narrowing Americans liberties and subduing the freeness of our nation today. We must hold the line and stop it now before the current climate of fear degrades into an even worse social and government climate in which previously unimagined restrictions become possible.

How can you help stop this vicious cycle from degrading further and refuse to do as you are told to do? Watch Larry Elders Uncle Tom. Sign up for updates from Hawleys new publisher (and one of mine), Regnery Publishing.

Use alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, and Google, such as Clouthub and DuckDuckGo. Encourage tolerance for different viewpoints at your workplace and hire conservatives. To counter Courics call to de-program, download, read, and share the 1776 Report. All these and more are strategies all of us can use to exercise our societys weakening free speech muscles.

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Blacklisting And Censorship Are Hallmarks Of Repressive Societies - The Federalist

How about Ted Cruz slams Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over censorship at Senate hearing USA TODAY

Despite repeatedcharges of anti-conservative bias from former President Donald Trump and other GOP critics, Facebook, Twitter and Googles YouTube are not slanted against right-leaning users, a new report out of New York University found.

Like previous research, False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives, concludes thatrather than censoring conservatives, social media platforms amplify their voices.

Republicans, or more broadly conservatives, have been spreading a form of disinformation on how they're treated on social media. They complain theyre censored and suppressed but, not only is there not evidence to support that, what evidence exists actually cuts in the other direction, said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, which released the report Monday.

Conservatives Twitter purge: Trump allies and Republican lawmakers lost thousands of followers in Twitter purge after Capitol riots

Censorship or conspiracy theory?Trump supporters say Facebook and Twitter censor them but conservatives still rule social

The report lands as a unifying argument is taking shape that major forces in American society big media, big government, big business are muzzling conservatives. That argument intensified after the major social media platforms suspended Trump out of fear he would incite violence following the U.S. Capitol attack.

There is a broad campaign going on from the right to argue that theyre being silenced or cast aside, and that spirit is what is helping to feed the extremism that we are seeing in our country right now, Barrett said. We cant just allow that to be a debating point. Its not legitimate. Its not supported by the facts.

Many groups across the political spectrum feel their opinions and perspectives are under siege whensocial media platforms moderate content, researchers say, but its difficult to make the case that these platforms are biased against any one group since the platforms disclose so little about how they decide what content is allowed and what is not.

Facebook, Twitter and Googles YouTube are not slanted against right-leaning users, a new report says.(Photo: LIONEL BONAVENTURE, AFP/Getty Images)

For their part, Facebook and Twitter say their platforms strike a balance between promoting free expression and removing hate, abuse and misinformation. They acknowledge making enforcement errors but insist their policies are applied fairly to everyone.

Conservative author Denise McAllister does not see it that way. And shes called on the social media platforms to stop moderating speech altogether.

This is a platform, right? You don't need to act like mama Twitter or mama Facebook. Just let people say what they are going to say, whether its true, false, whatever, she recently told USA TODAY. You have to just trust the people as individuals and not to try to impose power because you are going to do it inconsistently.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Facebook would no longer recommend political and civic groups to users and would downplay politics in people's News Feeds.

A recent poll shows that majorities in both parties think political censorship is likely occurring on social media, but that belief is most prevalent on the political right.

Nine in 10 Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party say its at least somewhat likely that social media platforms censor political viewpoints they find objectionable, up slightly from 85% in 2018, according to an August report from the Pew Research Center.

CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg appears on a monitor as he testifies remotely during a congressional hearing to discuss reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act .(Photo: MICHAEL REYNOLDS, POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The perception that social media platforms censor conservatives is regularly circulated by Fox News hosts, GOP lawmakers in congressional hearings and online pundits. That, in turn, has intensified GOP calls to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social media companies from legal liability for what their users post and gives platforms immunity when moderating objectionable content.

Bipartisan support to restrain the vast power held by a handful of large corporations grew during the Trump administration and shows no signs of ebbing as Democrats retake the White House.

Social media platforms have been judged harshly by both parties for how they policed content over the past year, from the COVID-19 pandemic to election-related misinformation and disinformation.

Oversight board to review Trump ban: Facebook refers Donald Trump indefinite suspension after Capitol attack to oversight board which could overturn it

YouTube Trump ban:Google extends suspension of former President Trump's channel

Democrats, including Biden, say the social media platforms dont restrict or remove enough harmful content, particularly hate speech, extremism, hoaxes and falsehoods. They have called on companies to play a bigger and more responsible role in curating public debate.

Those on the right say these platforms have too much latitude to restrict and remove content and target conservatives based on their political beliefs.

Those grievances boiled over when Facebook, Twitter and YouTube suspended Trumps accounts, citing the risk that he would use his social media megaphone to incite more violence before the end of his term.

After being permanently suspended from Twitter, Trump accused the company of banning free speech in cahoots with the Democrats and Radical Left.

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Do Facebook, Twitter and YouTube censor conservatives? Claims 'not supported by the facts,' new research says - USA TODAY