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Tucker Carlson Accuses Facebook of ‘Ideological Warfare’ – Here’s Why

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson decried the actions of Facebook as “ideological warfare” as many conservatives sites saw their traffic from the social networking site collapse after a change in their algorithm governing news. . .

“Just about everybody in the country has got a smartphone,” said Carlson, “spending a day without going online is unfathomable to almost all of us. Tech rules our lives to an ever greater degree.”

“But the so called digital frontier is getting fenced in,” he continued, “it’s not quite as broad as we were told it would be. A handful of companies now have almost total control over what we can say, do, or see on the internet. Control of almost all human information.”

“Consider Facebook,” he added. “About half the country uses it as a primary news source. Millions and millions of people understand the world through Facebook. But Facebook is not a neutral host – it has a political agenda.”

“Earlier this day Facebook altered its algorithms for what news stories its users see, and the results conclusively have been devastating for conservatives online,” he explained. “Breitbart, the news site, has basically lost about 30 percent of its traffic since that happened. Prager [University] down 32 percent, Daily Caller is down. Rare closed its doors. Some reports say IJR is on the brink of collapse because of it. Fox, by the way, is down too.” (Read more from “Tucker Carlson Accuses Facebook of ‘Ideological Warfare’ – Here’s Why” HERE)

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Nightmare: Facebook Gave Users the Option to Search for Child Pornography

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Facebook has apologized for its search auto-fill function suggesting sexual acts, including with minors.

The Hill reported that Facebook users began posting images on social media of the search suggestions popping up when they typed “videos of” last week.

There were multiple references to sexual acts involving minors.

Facebook released a statement apologizing for the issue.

“As soon as we became aware of these offensive predictions we removed them. Facebook search predictions are representative of what people may be searching for on Facebook and are not necessarily reflective of actual content on the platform,” the company said in a statement to The U.K. Guardian.

“We do not allow sexually explicit imagery, and we are committed to keeping such content off of our site,” Facebook added.

Earlier this month, Facebook admitted to making another “mistake” when it sent a survey out questioning whether pedophiles requesting pictures on Facebook should be permitted.

“There are a wide range of topics and behaviors that appear on Facebook,” read one question, The Hill reported. “In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.”

Users were given answers to choose from ranging from the content should not be allowed to it “should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it.”

A follow-up question again involving an adult men soliciting a 14-year-old girl for explicit pictures gave the option for letting “Facebook users decide the rules by voting.”

Company vice president Guy Rosen tweeted, “We run surveys to understand how the community thinks about how we set policies. But this kind of activity is and will always be completely unacceptable on FB.”

“We regularly work with authorities if identified,” he added. “It shouldn’t have been part of this survey. That was a mistake.”

Yet another controversy rocked Facebook on Friday, when it was reported that data for 50 million users was revealed during the 2016 presidential race.

Bloomberg reported that Facebook stock fell 8.1 percent to $170.06 in trading in Monday, which represented its largest single day drop since 2015. (For more from the author of “Nightmare: Facebook Gave Users the Option to Search for Child Pornography” please click HERE)

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Proof! Facebook Destroying Conservatives

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It’s no longer speculation that Facebook’s changing algorithms has hurt what is perceived as right-of-center news sites and benefited left-of-center online news outlets, according to a comprehensive analysis by WesternJournal.com.

According to the study, liberal publishers have gained about 2 percent more web traffic from Facebook than they were getting prior to the algorithm changes implemented in early February. On the other hand, conservative publishers have lost an average of nearly 14 percent of their traffic from Facebook.

“This algorithm change, intentional or not, has in effect censored conservative viewpoints on the largest social media platform in the world,” the study concludes. “This change has ramifications that, in the short-term, are causing conservative publishers to downsize or fold up completely, and in the long-term could swing elections in the United States and around the world toward liberal politicians and policies.”

The WesternJournal.com study compares two rival New York publishers — the New York Post and the New York Daily News. The Post is well-known as a right-leaning outlet, whereas the Daily News has an established left-leaning slant. The Daily News saw a 24.18 percent increase in traffic from Facebook, while the right-leaning Post’s traffic dropped 11.44 percent in the same time period.

The report quotes Campbell Brown, a former anchor on NBC and CNN who now leads Facebook’s news partnerships team, who told attendees at a recent technology and publishing conference that Facebook would be censoring news publishers based on its own internal biases: “This is not us stepping back from news. This is us changing our relationship with publishers and emphasizing something that Facebook has never done before: It’s having a point of view, and it’s leaning into quality news. … We are, for the first time in the history of Facebook, taking a step to try to to define what ‘quality news’ looks like and give that a boost.” (Read more from “Proof! Facebook Destroying Conservatives” HERE)

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Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your Phone’s Mic

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By Wall Street Journal. A conspiracy theory has spread among Facebook and Instagram users: The company is tapping our microphones to target ads. It’s not . . .

Yeah, sure, and the government swears it isn’t keeping any pet aliens at Area 51. So I contacted former Facebook employees and various advertising technology experts, who all cited technical and legal reasons audio snooping isn’t possible.

Uploading and scanning that much audio data “would strain even the resources of the NSA,” says former Facebook ad-targeting product manager Antonio Garcia Martinez. “They would need to understand the context of what you are saying—not just listen for words,” says Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager.

I believe them, but for another reason: Facebook is now so good at watching what we do online—and even offline, wandering around the physical world—it doesn’t need to hear us. After digging into the various bits of info Facebook and its advertisers collect and the bits I’ve actually handed over myself, I can now explain why I got each of those eerily relevant ads. (Facebook ads themselves offer limited explanations when you click “Why am I seeing this?”) (Read more from “Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your Phone’s Mic” HERE)
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Facebook Creating ‘Spy Robot’ for Your Home

By Metro. It’s the social network which has made billions by gathering huge amounts of information about its users and selling this data to advertisers.

Now a patent has emerged which shows Facebook is developing a robot capable of spying on people in their own homes.

It has been granted a patent for a ‘self-balancing robot’ fitted with cameras and microphones.

Zuckerberg’s surveillance-bot can speed along on three wheels before standing aloft on two wheels.

Experts said it would probably be very expensive and is likely to be used as a corporate ‘telepresence robot’, which is the name for machines used to interact with humans. (Read more from “Facebook Creating ‘Spy Robot’ for Your Home” HERE)

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Bombshell: Facebook Caught Surveying Users on Pedophilia

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Facebook has been forced to apologize for publishing a disturbing survey that asked whether an adult man should be allowed to solicit “sexual pictures” from an underage girl.

On Sunday, U.K. Guardian editor Jonathan Haynes noted that the survey had “popped up on Facebook.”

“In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures,” read one of the questions in the survey.

Users were given several options to respond, including one choice that said such content “should be allowed, and I would not mind seeing it.”

Another question asked users who should decide whether or not adult men should be permitted to solicit sexual pictures from underage girls.

“Facebook users decide the rules by voting and tell Facebook” was one option, while another was, “Facebook decides the rules on its own.”

As noted by The Guardian, users were not given the option to alert law enforcement in order to turn in the hypothetical sexual predator.

After receiving widespread criticism, Facebook apologized for the survey, calling it a “mistake.”

“We run surveys to understand how the community thinks about how we set policies,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of product. “But this kind of activity is and will always be completely unacceptable on FB. We regularly work with authorities if identified. It shouldn’t have been part of this survey. That was a mistake.”

The company seemed to be doing its best to distance itself from the survey.

“We understand this survey refers to offensive content that is already prohibited on Facebook and that we have no intention of allowing so have stopped the survey,” a spokesperson for the social media network said in a statement.

“We have prohibited child grooming on Facebook since our earliest days; we have no intention of changing this and we regularly work with the police to ensure that anyone found acting in such a way is brought to justice,” the statement continued.

But unsurprisingly, the survey received near universal condemnation.

“This is a stupid and irresponsible survey,” said Yvette Cooper, a member of Britain’s parliament and the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

“Adult men asking 14-year-olds to send sexual images is not only against the law, it is completely wrong and an appalling abuse and exploitation of children. I cannot imagine that Facebook executives ever want it on their platform but they also should not send out surveys that suggest they might tolerate it or suggest to Facebook users that this might ever be acceptable.” (For more from the author of “Bombshell: Facebook Caught Surveying Users on Pedophilia” please click HERE)

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Facebook Threatens Christian Site Over ‘False’ CNN Story

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Christian satire site The Babylon Bee received a terse warning from Facebook this week after the “independent fact-checkers” at Snopes reported that one of the site’s humor articles was “false.”

Adam Ford, who runs The Babylon Bee, was warned by Facebook that a recent satire article about CNN “contains information disputed by (Snopes.com) an independent fact checker.” Repeat offenders, Ford was told, “will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertized [sic] removed.”

The story in question pokes fun at CNN with the headline: “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication.” Anyone with even a sliver of a funny bone tucked away behind their appendix would know that it wasn’t a serious news piece, but, alas, the humorless dolts at Snopes had to spell out the obvious.

This past December PolitiFact discussed its partnership with Facebook and explained how it works. “Our partnership with Facebook is part of a push by the social media company to clean up its news feed and become a more trustworthy platform,” PolitiFact’s Aaron Sharackman wrote. “Facebook introduced a new tool after the 2016 campaign that allows users to mark a post as a ‘false news story,’ and if enough do, the post is sent to fact-checkers like PolitiFact, Snopes and Factcheck.org.” . . .

Factcheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes all have reputations for being biased in favor of liberals, so it’s no wonder Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a flaming liberal himself, is relying heavily on these organizations to be arbiters of truth in the Facebook universe. The company that utterly failed at keeping Russian bots from interfering in the 2016 election now has apparently set its sights on conservative websites. (Read more from “Facebook Threatens Christian Site Over ‘False’ CNN Story” HERE)

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Insider: Facebook Is a ‘Living, Breathing Crime Scene’

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(Editor’s note: Facebook’s war against conservative sites like Restoring Liberty is in full swing. Our posts now show up in much less than 1% of our followers’ feeds! And we aren’t the only ones. Please go to Gab today – an excellent substitute for Facebook – and sign up now! Gab promises to never censor or artificially suppress websites because of “unpopular” speech. Please follow Restoring Liberty HERE so you get all of our future posts)

By NBC News. With more than 2 billion users, Facebook’s reach now rivals that of Christianity and exceeds that of Islam. However, the network’s laser focus on profits and user growth has come at the expense of its users, according to one former Facebook manager who is now speaking out against the social platform.

“One of the things that I saw consistently as part of my job was the company just continuously prioritized user growth and making money over protecting users,” the ex-manager, Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook for 16 months, starting in 2011, told NBC News. During his tenure at Facebook, Parakilas led third-party advertising, privacy and policy compliance on Facebook’s app platform.

As Facebook transitioned from a Harvard dorm-room project into one of the world’s most valuable companies, its power grew in ways that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg never could have anticipate . . .

(Editor’s note: the theory that Facebook is responsible for Trump’s presidential win is now motivating the social media giant’s war against conservative posts. In the last several months, Facebook has eliminated Restoring Liberty’s posts from tens of thousands of followers’ feeds. Since the 2016 election, Restoring Liberty’s reach on Facebook has been unilaterally cut by Facebook by a whopping 90%. See the story below on how other conservatives are handling this censorship.)

Over the past 14 months, Zuckerberg has gone from saying it was “crazy” to think Facebook could influence an election to vowing that 2018 is the year he will “fix” Facebook. . .

“Facebook is a living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election — and only they have full access to what happened,” said Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. His work centers on how technology can ethically steer the thoughts and actions of the masses on social media and he’s been called “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” by The Atlantic magazine. (Read more from “Facebook Is a ‘Living, Breathing Crime Scene’” HERE)

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What Conservatives Need to Understand About Facebook

By Fox News. “Todd, how come I never see your stories in my Facebook news feed?”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve received such a question from readers. They “like” our Facebook page and they “follow” our Facebook page – but for whatever reason, conservative content never makes it to their newsfeed . . .

But I write for conservative patriots and I want conservative patriots to be able to read my writings. So how do we make that happen in the age of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat?

Well, we’re going “old-school.” We’re going to provide you a weekly newsletter. The newsletter will include links to every one of my stories and radio commentaries. And best of all – it’s free and we promise not to share your email address or spam you. If you register for our newsletter, you will receive one newsletter a week — that’s it.

Facebook has been a very unfriendly territory for conservatives and especially conservative Christians. I have documented countless instances of censorship, from Chicks-on-the-Right to Catholic organizations. (Read more from “What Conservatives Need to Understand About Facebook” HERE)

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Police Spot Evidence in a Selfie That Solved Murder Case

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A Facebook selfie posted by a Canadian woman gave police officers the missing piece to a murder case.

Cheyenne Rose Antoine posted a picture with the murder victim, and in it Antoine was wearing the belt that was found near the dead woman’s body, Fox News reported.

The 21-year-old pleaded guilty on Monday to killing Brittney Gargol in March 2015. Antoine has been sentenced to seven years in prison.

The photo appeared on Facebook after Gargol was found dead on the side of a road in Saskatoon, according to Fox.

The two friends had gotten into an argument after a night of drinking before Antoine used her belt to strangle Gargol.

Antoine posted on Gargol’s personal Facebook page the next morning: “Where are you? Haven’t heard from you. Hope you made it home safe,” BBC reported.

Police later discovered that this post was a diversion attempt to add to her original story.

Initially, Antoine told the police that the two friends had gone to some bars after a house party from which Gargol left with an unidentified man and Antoine went to visit her uncle.

After security footage from the bar failed to verify her story, police used Antoine’s social media to try to piece together the real story, according to CBC. There, they found the picture with the murder weapon worn by Antoine.

A witness ultimately told the police that Antoine had confessed to her that she killed Gargol.

Antoine told the courtroom that she did not remember strangling her friend, but admitted that they were both drunk and high on marijuana before their argument.

“I will never forgive myself. Nothing I say or do will ever bring her back,” she said in a statement, according to Fox News. “I am very, very sorry. … It shouldn’t have ever happened.”

According to Antoine’s lawyer, she told the police a month before the murder that she was being abused by her foster parents.

BBC reported that because Antoine showed remorse, the judge agreed to a seven year sentence after a guilty plea to manslaughter and not the second-degree murder Antoine was originally charged with.

“Honor your friend by becoming a positive member of the community,” Judge Marilyn Gray told Antoine. “You owe it to her.”

Gargol’s family expressed anger and sadness over her death, and her uncle said that she was “a wonderful person that didn’t deserve this and we truly miss her every day,” according to the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.

“Most days we can’t stop thinking about Brittney, what happened that night, what she must have felt fighting for her life,” Jennifer Gargol, the victim’s aunt, told the court. (For more from the author of “Police Spot Evidence in a Selfie That Solved Murder Case” please click HERE)

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Facebook Blocks Funding for Major Pro-Life Movie

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A crowdfunding site for a theatrical drama in production that promises to tell the “true story” of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that established a “right” to abortion has been blocked by Facebook.

The movie’s producer, Nick Loeb, told WND the content of the pro-life movie, which exposes Planned Parenthood’s roots in the eugenics movement, clearly is the reason for the censorship.

“They have even blocked people sharing the ads I paid for,” Loeb said. . .

Facebook has not responded to requests for an explanation.

Loeb told WND he and his colleagues are looking for a lawyer to take on the case. (Read more from “Facebook Blocks Funding for Major Pro-Life Movie” HERE)

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Facebook Developing Gadget Which Will Let It Put Microphones and Cameras in People’s Homes

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By Jasper Hamill. The social network is planning to release its first ever piece of consumer hardware which will be called Portal and cost a whopping $499 (£368), a website called Cheddar has claimed.

The device will feature a 15inch screen, a wide-angle camera with facial recognition and microphones to allow voice control.

It’s expected to use facial recognition to allow people to log into their accounts without having to type in passwords and will be dedicated to video chat.

The gadget has been designed by a shadowy Facebook department called Building 8 that’s also working on mind-reading technology.

‘Rather than position the device as a smart assistant akin to Amazon’s Echo speakers, Facebook intends to pitch Portal as a way for families and friends to stay connected through video chatting and other social features,’ the website wrote. (Read more from “Facebook Developing Gadget Which Will Let It Put Microphones and Cameras in People’s Homes” HERE)

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Facebook Wants You to Send in Your Nudes, to Stop Revenge Porn

By Rob Waugh. Facebook wants you to send in your nudes, so the company can battle revenge porn – and it’s totally legit.

It might sound like an email scam, but the company’s piloting the technology in Australia – allowing people who’ve shared nudes with partners to stop the files being shared when a relationship ends.

People who are concerned that an ex-partner might share nudes on WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook can upload the files – and the company ‘fingerprints’ them.

From that point, any attempts to upload or share the same image will be blocked, the Guardian reports.

Australia’s e-safety commissioner Julia Inman Grant told ABC, ‘We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly.’ (Read more from “Facebook Wants You to Send in Your Nudes, to Stop Revenge Porn” HERE)

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