The primary purpose of the Main Stream Media is to restrict speech and curtail debate. For that reason, seemingly every week, there's a new campaign from journalists demanding corporate oligarchs shut down the people they don't like.
There's also the small matter of how the sausage is made, in other words, who actually does the censoring.
Turns out it's mostly immigrants imported from the Middle East who are paid as little as possible.
[The Terror Queue, by Casey Newton, The Verge, December 16, 2019]
Of course, there is actual "violent extremism" that is put up online. ISIS propaganda videos, drug cartel violence, open calls to incitement and murder, etc. However, what the MSM is really interested in purging is speech they don't like. Essentially, Middle Eastern immigrants are being given veto power over what Americans are and are not allowed to say on the dominant online media platform.
Like many of his co-workers working in the [Violent Extremism] queue in Austin, Peter is an immigrant. Accenture recruited dozens of Arabic speakers like him, many of whom grew up in the Middle East. The company depends on his language skills — he speaks seven — to accurately identify hate speech and terrorist propaganda and remove it from YouTube...
There's also the usual writing pattern you see in the MSM. They campaign against a target, in this case free speech, and then report on it like it's an organic movement or that somebody else other than journalists themselves is demanding action.
He [Peter] joined the project in 2017, the year it began. At the time, YouTube had come under significant pressure to clean up the platform [From whom?]. Journalists and academics who investigated the service had found a large volume of videos containing hate speech, harassment, misinformation about mass shootings and other tragedies, and content harmful to children. (Many of those videos had been found on YouTube Kids, an app the company had developed in an effort to steer children toward safer material.)
Obviously, there was a lot of sick stuff on YouTube. Some of it, frankly, you don't want to know about, including the content directed at children.
But look at some of the key words above. "Hate speech." "Misinformation about mass shootings and other tragedies." "Harassment." Who decides what constitute these things?
The MSM has promoted several stories in the last few years that were completely made up. Partially fired up by this fake news, Donald Trump supporters and even administration officials have been attacked in the streets or at their homes. And while conservative channels are constantly on the verge of being deleted, you can find the most extreme left-wing activists operating without interference, never having to worry about whether corporate oligarchs will take away their PayPal or throttle their content.
Of course, there's some unintended consequences. Some Facebook moderators end up believing in the "conspiracy theories" spread on the platform.
The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”
[The Trauma Floor, by Casey Newton, The Verge, February 25, 2019]
Yes, obviously, there are conspiracy theories spread on Facebook. And there should be some standards (no overt calls to violence, pornography, explicit material.) But if even the people trusted to moderate content end up believing the "conspiracy theories," that removes the theoretical justification for self-government. It means we really can't trust people to make up their own mind, and they must only be given official propaganda.
That seems to be what our "free press" really wants.
