Month: March 2018

Posted on

Facebook Refuses to Disclose Secret List of Media Outlets They Are Suppressing

Facebook Refuses to Disclose Secret List of Media Outlets They Are Suppressing

March 22, 2018
by Cristina Laila

A Facebook spokesman refuses to disclose which media outlets the tech giant is suppressing and which outlets they deem “trusted” sources of news.

We already know Facebook is suppressing conservative media outlets.

Facebook has launched at all out assault on conservatives with their algorithm changes.

Conservative voices are being snuffed out on Facebook while liberal sites such as CNN are being boosted.

The Gateway Pundit has written extensively about this assault on conservative voices.

The latest algorithm changes by Facebook suppressed conservative publishers and boosted liberal propaganda.

Facebook told the Daily Caller News Foundation it will not disclose which outlets it is boosting and which media it is suppressing.

The algorithm changes also caused President Donald Trump’s engagement on Facebook posts to plummet a whopping 45%.

In contrast, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) do not appear to have suffered a comparable decline in Facebook engagement.

Top conservative Facebook pages with daily traffic in the millions have seen 75% to 95% drop in traffic.
Young Cons, Western Journalism, SarahPalin.com, Independent Journal Review, Right Wing News, and several others have seen dramatic loss in traffic.

We already know The Gateway Pundit was hit the hardest by these changes.

Via The Outline:

Recently, Facebook actually admitted their liberal bias and actions to suppress the conservative America loving point of view –

Campbell Brown, a former anchor on NBC and CNN who now leads Facebook’s news partnerships team, 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.” (Emphasis added.)

Many conservative media outlets have paid Facebook thousands of dollars in advertising only to have the tech giant hide their algorithms and secret lists of who they target for suppression.

We are way overdue for an internet bill of rights to make sure conservative voices aren’t silenced.

Comments

As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to edit or remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, anti-Semitism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. The same applies to trolling, the use of multiple aliases, or just generally being a jerk. Enforcement of this policy is at the sole discretion of the site administrators and repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without warning

via The Gateway Pundit

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com

Posted on

Congress Gives Itself a Bonus in Omnibus

The House and Senate increased their own budgets in the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending package.

The Senate increased its total salaries of officers and employees by $12.6 million in the 2,232-page bill that lawmakers had fewer than 48 voters to read and vote on. The bill avoids a government shutdown that would take place at midnight on Friday.

Aside from giving their own institutions a bonus, the omnibus also gives away millions to prevent "elderly falls," promote breastfeeding, and fight "excessive alcohol use."

The legislation increases the Senate budget to $919.9 million, up $48.8 million from fiscal year 2017, according to the congressional summary of the bill.

"The increase provides funding necessary for critical modernization and upgrades of the Senate financial management system and investments in IT security," the summary states.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives increased its budget to $1.2 billion, which is $10.9 million above 2017 levels.

Salaries of staffers in the Senate are also set for an increase. Division I of the legislation breaks down the total salaries of officers and employees, which are being raised from $182 million in 2017 to $194.8 million in the final bill, an increase of $12.58 million.

The Senate also increased its expense account, as expense allowances are going from $177,000 to $192,000, an increase of $15,000.

The House, however, kept its budget for salaries the same at $22.3 million and lowered expenses by $4.4 million.

Committee offices got an increase of $22.9 million in salaries, from $181.5 million in 2017 to $204.4 million in the final bill.

The omnibus also boosts funding for health research, including a $3 billion increase to the ever-growing budget of the National Institutes of Health.

Health care spending in the omnibus includes $4 million to combat "excessive alcohol use" through a CDC prevention and health promotion program.

Another $15 million goes to study "high obesity counties" and an increase of $5 million for the CDC program that seeks to "address obesity in counties" by leveraging "the community extension services provided by land grant universities who are mandated to translate science into practical action and promote healthy lifestyles."

The bill also spends $2.05 million to prevent "elderly falls" and $8 million in the form of "breastfeeding grants."

The legislation also mandates the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau to improve "wine label accuracy."

The House passed the spending package Friday, and the Senate is expected to follow.

The post Congress Gives Itself a Bonus in Omnibus appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

via Washington Free Beacon

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: http://freebeacon.com

Posted on

YouTube Joins War On Second Amendment With New Anti-Gun Policy

Google’s video service YouTube has been one of the more active crushers of enforcing the totalitarian left’s unspoken mandate that all patriotic speech, support of Trump and dissent from the temporarily stalled globalist project and has now taken aim at pro-Second Amendment videos which are a target of opportunity for the thought police. What is going on as far as censoring conservative viewpoints by demonetizing websites that have become dependent on social media giants for advertising is nothing short of fascism and yet it continues to get worse by the day.

Now YouTube is going after certain gun videos and this is only the beginning of what is yet to come from corporations with mega-wealthy CEOS whose loyalty is to the Democratic party machine rather than to their own users. The ongoing purges are nothing short of liberal California tech oligarchs meddling in the 2018 and 2020 elections in order to give the Dems a majority and then prevent President Trump from winning a second term.

Via Bloomberg “YouTube Bans Firearms Demo Videos, Entering the Gun Control Debate”:

YouTube, a popular media site for firearms enthusiasts, this week quietly introduced tighter restrictions on videos involving weapons, becoming the latest battleground in the U.S. gun-control debate.

YouTube will ban videos that promote or link to websites selling firearms and accessories, including bump stocks, which allow a semi-automatic rifle to fire faster. Additionally, YouTube said it will prohibit videos with instructions on how to assemble firearms. The video site, owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, has faced intense criticism for hosting videos about guns, bombs and other deadly weapons.

For many gun-rights supporters, YouTube has been a haven. A current search on the site for “how to build a gun” yields 25 million results, though that includes items such as toys. At least one producer of gun videos saw its page suspended on Tuesday. Another channel opted to move its videos to an adult-content site, saying that will offer more freedom than YouTube.

“We routinely make updates and adjustments to our enforcement guidelines across all of our policies,” a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement. “While we’ve long prohibited the sale of firearms, we recently notified creators of updates we will be making around content promoting the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories.”

Additional information from Guns.com “Pending YouTube content changes sends gun vloggers scrambling”:

A new policy modification on how the video-sharing giant monitors certain content featuring guns has some feeling the pressure.

The new rules, announced Tuesday, include making it clear that YouTube will not host videos highlighting guns or some accessories such as bump stocks or magazines capable of holding more than 30 rounds for private sale by individuals. The Google subsidiary also said it won’t allow clips on manufacturing ammunition, guns, or suppressors or how to install or modify certain accessories.

“Their discriminatory policy would make at least half of the videos that I have produced prohibited,” notes The VSO Gun Channel, which as of Tuesday had 129,000 subscribers. Others, such as the suppressor-heavy NFA Review Channel, warned the policy would “effectively shut down all gun pages.”

The latest policy update because never forget that fascism is incremental:

YouTube prohibits certain kinds of content featuring firearms. Specifically, we don’t allow content that:

  • Intends to sell firearms or certain firearms accessories through direct sales (e.g., private sales by individuals) or links to sites that sell these items. These accessories include but may not be limited to accessories that enable a firearm to simulate automatic fire or convert a firearm to automatic fire (e.g., bump stocks, gatling triggers, drop-in auto sears, conversion kits), and high capacity magazines (i.e., magazines or belts carrying more than 30 rounds).
  • Provides instructions on manufacturing a firearm, ammunition, high capacity magazine, homemade silencers/suppressors, or certain firearms accessories such as those listed above. This also includes instructions on how to convert a firearm to automatic or simulated automatic firing capabilities.
  • Shows users how to install the above-mentioned accessories or modifications.

To quote historian Milton Mayer from his book on the life in Nazi Germany “They Thought They Were Free” and pay attention to this folks…

… what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.

One day it is over his head

The next set of “new rules” will tighten the garotte around the necks of patriotic Americans even more.

via Downtrend.com

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://downtrend.com

Posted on

Report: Navy Rejects Atheist Chaplain After Long Fight

Oxymoron – Atheist Chaplain.

Via Washington Examiner:

Sen. Roger Wicker said Wednesday that the Navy has finally denied the application of a man who sought to become a “secular humanist” chaplain for the service.

The application of Jason Heap, who was backed by the Humanist Society, was first rejected by the Navy in 2014, but a Navy chaplain advisory board recently recommended approving it.

The possibility of an atheist chaplain set off an outcry from both sides of Capitol Hill, and 45 House members and 22 senators sent letters of opposition this month to Navy leaders.

“The Navy’s leadership has done the right thing,” said Wicker, R-Miss., who chairs the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee. “The appointment of an atheist to an undeniably religious position is fundamentally incompatible with atheism’s secularism. This decision preserves the distinct religious role that our chaplains carry out.”

The service already has the authority to create programs to support atheists and humanists, senators said.

The Navy Chaplain Corps is manned by officers who promote religious and spiritual well-being among sailors and Marines. It represents a variety of religions including Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.

House lawmakers said the reconsideration of Heap’s application raised concerns that the Navy was trying to expand the Chaplain Corps beyond its intended focus of serving religious sailors by including philosophical beliefs.

Keep reading…

via Weasel Zippers

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.weaselzippers.us

Posted on

BACKFIRE: Broward County Implements ‘Solution’ For School Violence And Students Are Not Happy

On Wednesday, the superintendent of the Democrat-heavy Broward County Public Schools announced a new policy aimed at reducing school violence — and the students are not happy.

Superintendent Robert W. Runcie, a proponent of radical left-wing gun control measures, announced that students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will only be allowed to bring clear backpacks to school after spring break and will be required to wear a new ID badge at all times.

Needless to say, the students are not happy with the decision that the Democratic officials came up with to address the issue of school violence.

via Daily Wire

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.dailywire.com/rss.xml

Posted on

Citibank Goes Full Anti-Gun

Citibank announced on Thursday that it would no longer do business with anyone who sells guns to any person under 21-years-old as well as anyone who sells so-called high capacity magazines.

The bank, which nearly failed in 2008 but was saved by a massive taxpayer-funded bailout and now boasts a market capitalization of over $180 billion, said it wants to prevent guns from getting into the hands of the wrong people. It said it would be implementing a new policy directed at all the businesses with which it deals.

"So [sic] our new policy centers around current firearms sales best practices that will guide those we do business with as a firm," a post on the company’s website said.

The new policy would require that any company using Citibank financial services "restrict the sale of firearms for individuals under 21 years of age" and stop selling "bump stocks or high-capacity magazines." The company did not specify what they believe constitutes a "high-capacity" magazine and did not immediately respond to multiple requests for clarification. Citibank did not immediately answer whether it feared the blanket age requirement might lead to discrimination lawsuits like those Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods are facing after implementing similar corporate policies.

The bank said its new policy would apply to all kinds of business clients.

"This policy will apply across the firm, including to small business, commercial, and institutional clients, as well as credit card partners, whether co-brand or private label," the post said.

It said, however, that those with Citibank credit cards would still be able to purchase the products the company views as being responsible for "heartbreaking losses" and by those whose age the company appears to believe makes them too dangerous to own firearms.

"It doesn’t impact the ability of consumers to use their Citi cards at merchants of their choice," it said.

The bank, which hopes to recruit other financial institutions to adopt its gun-ban policies, said its decision isn’t anti-gun or ideological.

"Today, our CEO announced Citi is instituting a new U.S. Commercial Firearms Policy," the post said. "It is not centered on an ideological mission to rid the world of firearms. That is not what we seek."

It went on to say it respects Americans’ constitutional rights to own firearms.

"There are millions of Americans who use firearms for recreational and other legitimate purposes, and we respect their Constitutional right to do so," the company said.

Citibank said, however, it will work to pressure other financial companies to adopt the same policy banning the legal sale of guns to those under 21, despite that group’s constitutional right to own firearms.

"We recognize that we don’t have all the answers and that existing technology in our industry doesn’t allow for a more targeted approach at points of sale," the bank said. "For that reason, we would like to convene those in the financial services industry and other stakeholders to tackle these challenges together and see what we can do."

Citibank said it hopes "to leverage collective action to encourage responsible practices by all who sell firearms" by forcing them not to sell to anyone under 21 or sell so-called, but undefined, high-capacity magazines.

The bank said it expected the new policy banning sales of guns to a large swath of American adults to "invite passion on both sides." However, Citibank said the ban on purchases by any adult under 21 was necessary to "keep guns out of the hands of those who wish to do harm."

The post Citibank Goes Full Anti-Gun appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

via Washington Free Beacon

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: http://freebeacon.com

Posted on

Dad says daughter, 12, cried over being told she is ‘maybe a boy inside’ or ‘gay’ in sex-ed class

A father of a 12-year-old girl in Washington state said his daughter came home crying after a sex-ed class last fall during which she was told she was “maybe a boy inside” or “gay,” KCPQ-TV reported.

Jason Peterson — a single parent with four other children — told the station when he first agreed to let his daughter take the class from Sequim School District, he figured the content would be along the lines of “pregnancies and STDs and all of those things that you want your kids to know about.”

Jason Peterson (Image source: KING-TV video screenshot)
Jason Peterson (Image source: KING-TV video screenshot)

Instead, Peterson told KPCQ his girl came home confused and upset over gender identity.

“They told her that if she liked skateboarding and fishing and wearing athletic gear [and] playing basketball that those were boy things,” he told the station. “And … that would mean that she was maybe a boy inside or that she was gay.”

Not that Peterson has a problem with kids who are gay or believe they are another gender — but he told KING-TV his 6th-grade girl left the class feeling as though she was being encouraged to question her identity.

“I think people should be free to be who they are,” Peterson told KCPQ. “They’re discriminating, though, against her identity. And how much of it do you have to put up with?”

“[My daughter] was very confused by it,” he told KING. “She likes playing basketball, she likes going fishing with Dad, she likes skateboarding and she likes being a girl. And I told her those weren’t boy things — they were people things. That people liked to do those things.”

More than that, Peterson KCPQ the sex-ed curriculum leaned heavily toward gender-identity issues rather than medically or scientifically based sexual health.

“The thing is … it’s front burnered,” he told KCPQ. “Twenty out of 32 pages … are generated to gender identity. It’s heavily weighted toward that. It’s biased toward that.”

What happened next?

Peterson and other parents who felt the same way aired their concerns with the principal and soon district superintendent Gary Neal, who stopped the program for the time being, KCPQ reported.

Neal added to the station that a group will be formed to discuss content standards and age-appropriateness issues for the sex-ed curriculum with the aim of completing the study prior to the start of the next school year.

What else do we know about the sex-ed program?

The district uses FLASH — i.e., Family Life and Sexual Health Curriculum, the station said, adding that the county developed it about 30 years ago.

“The information around gender identity is … medically accurate and based in science,” TJ Cosgrove, director of the Community Health Services division for King County Health, told KCPQ. “We have medical review locally, we have medical review nationally with some of the best experts to help us understand what … information we should be sharing.”

More from the station:

FLASH lessons are tested and reviewed by teachers before being published, according to King County Health officials. School districts have flexibility over how they implement FLASH – including which lessons they teach and at what grade they’re taught.

King County Public Health officials add that FLASH aligns with CDC National Health Education Standards and the National Sexuality Education Standards, which includes treating people with respect and dignity, officials said.

via TheBlaze.com – Stories

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.theblaze.com

Posted on

Mark Zuckerberg’s Promise: Zero Transparency, Zero Public Accountability

Mark Zuckerberg’s Promise: Zero Transparency, Zero Public Accountability

David Ramos/Getty

by Allum Bokhari22 Mar 20180



Mark Zuckerberg has just completed a non-apology tour around the media, conducting interviews with CNN, Recode, and Wired, in which he promised that Facebook would investigate itself,  four years after the company first realized it had given developers too much access to data on the friends and families of their users.

This is the same approach that Facebook adopted during the trending news scandal, when the company came under political pressure for discriminating against conservative news stories in their “trending” column. Facebook investigated itself, and (surprise!) found itself innocent.

Then they fired the entire team responsible for trending news, which is exactly what innocent companies do.

If Zuckerberg really wanted to show users that his company is changing its ways, he would promise a lot more than a Facebook-led investigation of data access.

Instead, he would promise transparency around data. In particular, he would not keep Facebook’s investigation internal. He would let users know which third-party apps had access to their data, their friends’ data, and to the data of others on the platform — and how much of it.

True, the total number of apps, even if restricted to the pre-2014 period when Facebook’s rules around data collection were weak, would number in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. But cataloging vast amounts of information is the very business of a tech company like Facebook. So why don’t they create a publicly-searchable list of every app that had access to user data prior to 2014, ranked according to how many users they collected data from?

Something tells me Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t be close to the top of the list. But Obama’s 2012 campaign might.

Users should also be able to search the database to discover which of the apps have their data. Because, remember, they might not know. Prior to 2014, an app didn’t need your permission to grab personally identifying information from your profile — they only needed permission from one of your Facebook friends.

That’s the loophole that Obama’s team exploited to harvest mass quantities of user data, and, quite possibly, win the 2012 election.

If Facebook wants to escape allegations of poisoning democracy, they also need to be transparent about their recent newsfeed changes, in particular, which sites have lost out and which have benefited. So far, the conservative media have had to highlight the fact that conservative sites, as well as Donald Trump, have been hit particularly badly by Facebook’s recent changes. Why won’t Facebook release engagement and reach rankings for all news sites that use their platform?

Probably because it would confirm what we know already: that Facebook is now boosting corporate mainstream media at the expensive of the alternative media. After promising publishers an equal playing field for years, the social network has pulled a bait-and-switch, leaving users with the same corporate-controlled information environment that the internet was supposed to liberate them from.

Kowtowing to corporations and global elites is now the order of the day at Facebook. Read between the lines of Zuckerberg’s media interviews, and you’ll see it. He did address the issue of transparency, but only around ad buys, telling CNN that he wants to let users know who is paying for ads on the platform.

But while users are unlikely to complain about this suggestion, the idea of hostile ads manipulating voters is an obsession of global elites, who think voters are idiots, not ordinary Facebook users. Ordinary Facebook users care about who has access to their data, and why they are no longer allowed to see news organizations they like on their newsfeeds. If Zuckerberg was really interested in transparency, he’d be transparent about that.

He isn’t really apologizing to users — he’s apologizing to politicians and global elites. That’s who he really considers himself accountable to — not the public.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.

via Breitbart News

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: http://www.breitbart.com