During Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony in front of Congress, one message from the social media juggernaut kept being pushed: “Trust us.”

Americans — and especially conservatives — had nothing to worry about, Zuck insisted. The platform may have made some mistakes, but Facebook is committed to being balanced and censorship-free. At least that’s what the CEO claimed.

Now, reports are surfacing about Facebook’s screening process being so strict and anti-gun that even innocent posts are being blocked. Case in point: The platform is apparently now banning information about “automatic watches” because it thinks they’re assault weapons.

On the “WatchGang” wristwatch enthusiast group, users have run into bizarre censorship. They are reportedly unable to post completely legal watch classified listings, because someone at Facebook has marked them as weapons.

“I have posted and reposted 6 or 7 different sale posts,” watch enthusiast Howie Boyd explained to the group. “In the last few days none of them show up to the group.”

Boyd was trying to sell a vintage model watch that is popular with collectors. Like many high-end watches, the timepiece is called “automatic” because it doesn’t require hand winding or a battery, but is mechanically powered by wrist movement.

“(Facebook) told me that it was because my Orient King Diver was an automatic weapon,” Boyd said.

Maybe it’s the same algorithm that “accidentally” flagged conservative bloggers Diamond and Silk as “dangerous.” First black bloggers, now wrist watches! It’s a dangerous world.

Other users confirmed they were having the same problem. “It did it to me too,” said Kevin Brown of Facebook’s censoring. “Leave automatic out of the posting title and you should be fine.”

For the record, here is what an “automatic watch” looks like. This is what social media censors are apparently terrified could wreak mayhem and murder throughout America.

RELATED: Zuck, FB Execs Use Shock Tool to Erase Incriminating Messages They Send

(Photo by Hydragyrum via Wikimedia commons)

One one hand, this is currently just an inconvenience and clearly not the end of the world. No platform is perfect, and it’s possible that Facebook is actively working to fix the problem.

On the other hand, there are some chilling implications to this “ban almost everything” approach.

Is a car with an “automatic transmission” being treated as a weapon by Facebook, too? After all, cars actually kill far more people than rifles, and it’s unlikely anyone has ever been murdered by a vintage wristwatch.

How many other topics and users are being censored without their knowledge? Since many of these “flags” are not immediately detectable until other users notice that posts are not appearing, there could be dozens or hundreds of everyday topics that are currently being banned by Facebook. We just don’t know.

Perhaps the must troubling realization, however, is that gatekeepers at Facebook seem to be incredibly out of touch with the real world.

Presumably somebody made the decision that an “automatic watch” is a weapon. What does this say about their knowledge — or lack thereof — about firearms, everyday objects like watches, or the world in general?

In other words, there are strong indications that the people hired by Facebook to police other people’s speech may be either clueless or biased.

Did they hire batches of millennials who have never seen an automatic watch? Considering the social media giant’s secrecy about its moderator staff, it’s difficult to know how far this general ignorance goes.

We’d love to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt, but there’s no getting around the fact these content flags are strange and borderline creepy.

The company could instill much more confidence in its platform and its even-handedness if it was more transparent about how content is blocked, and how this decision making process works. The age of social media is definitely strange.

What do you think? Scroll down to comment below!

If you have been following the horrifying tragic case of Alfie Evans —  sick U.K. toddler who has been denied additional treatment or release to seek treatment elsewhere — then prepare to be disgusted by the matter even further.

After the Pope attempted to intercede on the child’s behalf — Italy granted the boy citizenship and provided a military medical helicopter to transport him to a waiting Italian hospital for treatment — the National Health Service and U.K. courts nevertheless denied Evans’ release and literally sentenced him to death.

According to National Review, that involved removing the sick toddler from the life support apparatus that assisted his troubled breathing on Tuesday, a move that doctors expected would result in a fairly quick death for the boy.

Yet, more than 60 hours after that occurred, the child was still alive and breathing on his own.

Roughly one day after life support for Alfie had been removed, his father took to social media to lament that his precious boy had been “starved from nutrition for 23 hours” and asked how such treatment could be considered “humane” or dignified, according to LifeNews.

The fact Alder Hey Hospital was essentially attempting to hasten the death of the child through starvation or dehydration was far too much to bear for the boy’s parents and his legion of international supporters.

The fact Alfie was capable of surviving without the life support equipment gave new hope to his parents and compelled them to seek a new legal path to save him via appeals to the court.

Unfortunately, according to the series of running updates provided by the U.K. Mirror, the courts dashed that hope and ruled once more that the boy wasn’t to be released, again condemning him to die a slow death within a hospital that is purportedly supposed to be saving lives.

After their latest legal challenge was dismissed, and after little Alfie had survived for a third night without life support, the parents dropped their legal battle and sat down with doctors and hospital administrators to try and reach an agreeable solution, namely to at least let them take the boy home.

It is unclear exactly what would be discussed in that meeting or how it would go, but it is worth noting that Alfie’s father released a statement that many perceived as a “stand down” request to the hundreds of protesters who had gathered on behalf of the boy outside the hospital and elsewhere.

Let. Them. Take. Him. Home. #AlfieEvans pic.twitter.com/UkgPjJ3mll

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) April 26, 2018

In a related note, the U.K. Mirror reported on an effort by a Member of European Parliament from North West England named Steven Woolfe to introduce what is known as “Alfie’s Law,” which would grant more end-of-life decision-making abilities to the parents of terminally-ill children.

“The cases of Charlie Gard, Aysha King, and now Alfie Evans, show a dangerous trend of public bodies depriving parents and families of the right to make decisions they believe are in the best interests of their children,” Woolfe said.

RELATED: We Should All Teach Our Kids These 7 Skills That Liberals Have Tried to Do Away With

“Parents’ rights should neither be ignored nor dismissed as irrelevant by hospitals and courts, who believe they know best and have the power, money and resources to overwhelm families who simply want to save their child,” he continued as he demanded that laws be changed and parents provided with independent advocates on par with those of the hospitals and courts.

“Now is the time to act,” Woolfe added. “We cannot have another baby, another family, have to go through the struggle and torment the Evans family have. It’s time for Alfie’s Law.”

Indeed, it is time to act, not just to provide adequate legal representation and decision-making abilities to the parents of children sentenced to death, but to rid the world of the scourge of socialized medicine.

Recall the savage mockery and condescension former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin received after she warned years ago about “death panels” that would decide the fate of sick individuals based on cost analysis in a socialized health care system. Well, the Alfie Evans case is exactly what she was warning everybody about.

What do you think? Scroll down to comment below!

Diamond and Silk clashed with Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) over social media censorship during their congressional hearing on Thursday, with Johnson opting to mock and belittle the pair.

After criticizing the congressional committee for having a hearing on social media censorship in the first place, Johnson declared, “We’re giving a platform to Diamond and Silk, and you ladies are very impressive to me. You have taken something and you have moved forward with it, exercising your First Amendment rights, and you’ve made a ton of money off of Facebook, isn’t that correct?”

“Absolutely not,” Diamond and Silk replied. “Because Facebook censored us for six months.”

“Now, Donald Trump introduced you all at a rally last year, and he introduced you all saying you were very popular and you had made a ton of money based on your affiliation with him. Isn’t that correct? asked Johnson. “The point I’m trying to make is you have been bashing Facebook and you’ve been making a ton of money.”

“We didn’t bash Facebook,” the pair corrected. “What we did was brought it to the light on how Facebook has been censoring conservative voices like ourselves for six months, twenty-nine days.”

Johnson then asked, “Have you been making money? Have you been monetizing?” prompting Diamond and Silk to respond, “They won’t let us monetize on Facebook. They stopped it. For six months, twenty-nine days.”

“So they’ve been messing with your money then?” Johnson added, before making the excuse that they can still sell merchandise.

“Even if we sell merchandise, that doesn’t have anything to do with Facebook. Facebook censored our free speech, and shame on the ones that don’t even see that we have been censored, yet when the Black Lives Matter people complain about it, oh everybody is up in arms,” Diamond and Silk expressed. “Let me just say this here, if the shoe was on the other foot and Mark Zuckerberg was a conservative and we were liberals, all fences and all chains would’ve broken loose. You know it and I know it. What I find appalling is that these Democrats, they don’t want to take up for our voice, because we support the president.”

Johnson replied by claiming the hearing was “giving you a tremendous platform with this hearing to make a ton of money when it’s over,” pushing Diamond and Silk to declare, “That’s right, and I hope everybody goes on Facebook and follows us. Because that’s what it’s supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be about obtaining the American dream. We are African-American women. If illegal aliens can come over here and build businesses, why can’t we? We were born on this soil. You don’t have a right to silence my voice.”

After Johnson mocked Diamond over her name and brought up money again, they replied, “If Facebook is a platform for you to make money, then so be it, everybody else do it. Don’t stop us from making any. Don’t make us feel guilty because we and other people that have built their brand page want to make money. We’ve spent plenty of money.”

Johnson concluded with a final shot by proclaiming, “I’m just astounded that this committee would stoop to this level to be positioning you all to make more money.”

Migrants seeking asylum at the southern border must ask for asylum in the safe countries they transit, says Homeland Defense Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

“Individuals of the ‘caravan’ seeking asylum or other similar claims should seek protections in the first safe country they enter, including Mexico,” Nielsen said in an April 25 statement.

The statement spotlights the administration’s legal defenses against the roughly 1,000 caravan migrants trying to get through the legal loopholes in the border wall. Attorney General Jeff Sessions used similar language in an April 23 statement about the caravan migrants, saying “these individuals—and their smugglers—ignored the willingness of the Mexican government to allow them to stay in Mexico.”

The emphasis on migrants’ refusal asylum in Mexico may help U.S. immigration judges quickly reject migrants’ requests to file asylum claims — and later justify the rejection to U.S. judge when once pro-migration groups file multiple lawsuits in U.S. courts.

According to the relevant federal regulation, “an alien is considered to be firmly resettled if, prior to arrival in the United States, he entered into another nation with, or while in that nation received, an offer of permanent resident status, citizenship, or some other type of permanent resettlement.” Mexico does offer and grant asylum to people from Central America.

Also as far as I know only the US and Canada have an agreement requiring asylum seekers to ask for protection in the first country they arrive at. Many people in the caravan have actually asked Mexico for refuge.

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) April 26, 2018

Mexican officials, however, are resisting the U.S. argument that migrants can get asylum in Mexico, creating room for officials to block the migrant flow northwards in exchange for U.S. trade concessions. Politico reported:

“That’s not in the cards for now,” Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray said Wednesday of such a pact. “We’re not discussing that.”

…

“We have a strong willingness to do things together and cooperate,” he told Morning Shift. “[But] immigration policies of Mexico are set and defined only by Mexico and its people.”

Hundreds of the caravan migrants are expected to ask U.S. border officers for permission to file asylum claims this weekend.

The caravan migrants, whose estimated numbers range from 600 to 1,500, have been bussed northwards from Guatemala by a pro-migration, open-borders group. Along the way, the group has rested in various facilities and conducted media-magnified political demonstrations demanding a legal right to work in the United States.

Honduran migrant caravan readies for final squeeze through border loopholes this weekend. The event is a colorful, impressive mash-up of careful open-borders advocacy, media magnification, and migrants’ hard-nosed cost/benefit estimates. https://t.co/UZjM9ia1nu

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) April 26, 2018

In his Monday statement, Sessions added:

This is a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system. There is no right to demand entry without justification …

Accordingly, I have directed our U.S. Attorneys at the border to take whatever immediate action to ensure that we have sufficient prosecutors available. I have also directed that we commit any additional necessary immigration judges to adjudicate any [asylum] cases that may arise from this ‘caravan.’”

Nielsen’s Thursday statement said the department is moving people up to the border to quickly deal with the migrants. “DHS, in partnership with DOJ, has taken a number of steps to ensure the necessary resources are in place to promptly adjudicate all cases and claims, through either our civil immigration system or through criminal prosecution, consistent with our laws,” she said.

Under existing laws, migrants can walk through Nielsen’s border guards to ask border officers and Justice Department immigration judges for permission to file asylum claims in federal courts.

That screening process is tightly governed by existing laws and court precedents and sets a very low threshold of “credible fear.” The low threshold ensures that border officers and immigration judges can only reject migrant requests if the asylum claims are very weak.

After they are allowed to file an asylum claim, the migrants are released into the United States because they cannot be held in detention because the immigration-court system is so backlogged with more than 700,000 other asylum applications that the first available court dates can be two or three years in the future.

In 2018, Congress refused to create more detention spaces for migrants. Most of the agency’s detention facilities are almost fully occupied by other people who were caught trying to sneak across the border. The border jumpers are held until they are identified and processed, although some are also sent to jail.

Also, a 1997 court settlement, dubbed the Flores settlement, says officials cannot hold migrants with children for more than 20 days.

Once the asylum-seeking migrants are released, they are also allowed to apply for work permits.

Many poor migrants rationally use these “catch and release” loopholes to work legally in the United States for a few years, and many of those migrants also walk away from their asylum claims to work as illegal immigrants.

In 2017, the inflow crashed when Trump was elected. But is rising again because Congress has refused to change the border laws. In fact, more than 100,000 migrants have used the loopholes to walk through the walls since Trump was inaugurated.

Pro-migration advocates carefully describe these legal loopholes to migrants.

A volunteer attorney is explaining to a group of unaccompanied minors from the caravan the detention process in the US and the importance of reaching out to family who may sponsor their release once they’re in the custody of immigration authorities. pic.twitter.com/2vOnY5food

— Adolfo Flores (@aflores) April 8, 2018

However, Sessions is taking a variety of steps to reverse Obama’s open-border policies.

Every year, 4 million Americans turn 18 and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Polls show most Americans support Trump’s view of America as a nation of Americans, wrapped in a network of mutual obligations.

Immigration polls which ask people to pick a priority, or to decide which options are fair, show that voters in the polling booth put a high priority on helping their families and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy. Those results are very different from the “Nation of Immigrants” polls which are funded by CEOs and progressives, and which pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants.

 

 

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi publicly defended House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer after audio surfaced of a call in which he urged a Democrat candidate to drop out of a primary.

The controversy surrounding audio logs of a call between Hoyer and Colorado candidate Levi Tillerman uncovered by The Intercept continues to mount. Pelosi is trying to defuse the same tension that embittered supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary.

At her weekly press conference, Pelosi claimed that she didn’t “see anything inappropriate in what Mr. Hoyer was engaged in conversation about.” Further, she dismissed the manipulation as “if the realities of life is that some candidates can do better in the general than others, then that’s a clear-eyed conversation that we should be having.”

Hoyer’s own spokesperson, Katie Grant, said much the same: “Whip Hoyer is committed to taking back the House, and that involves working with local leaders to identify and support the strongest candidate for that district.”

But neither of those statements address the growing divide between the Democratic establishment and the ever-widening current of discontent from progressives in their base. Tillerman’s opposition, U.S. Army veteran Jason Crow, seems to have been the preferred choice for a run against Republican Mike Coffman.

According to Hoyer’s call, he is “for Crow because a judgment was made very early on.” Apparently, that decision is more about toeing the establishment line than personal opinion. Hoyer said, “I didn’t know Crow. I didn’t participate in the decision. But a decision was made early on by the Colorado delegation.”

Now Pelosi is attempting to cast aspersions on Tillerman himself, questioning the legality of recording the call in the first place — despite the recording being completely legal under Colorado law. “I don’t know that a person can tape a person without the person’s consent and then release it to the press. That’s what I’m more concerned about,” she complained.

Meanwhile, The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is taking action against “targeting” by the DCCC. They have called on Hoyer to resign from Democratic leadership and are asking donors to support Tillerman and others being pushed down from within their own party.

In a statement, PCCC co-founder Stephanie Taylor said, “Steny Hoyer and his corporate cronies already lost,” and “they don’t represent the future, and it’s time for them to step aside and make room for a new generation of leadership — one that inspires and motivates the base instead of depressing it.”