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The Continuous Attack on Free Speech, Part 2

The New York Analysis concludes its latest review of the ongoing attacks on the First Amendment.

How extreme is this threat getting? Consider California State Senator Pan’s proposed legislation,  which reads: “This bill would require any person who operates a social media, as defined, Internet Web site with a physical presence in California to…prominently display a link on the site to a disclosure informing users how the site determines what content to display to the user, the order in which content is displayed, and the format in which content is displayed, and to inform users of the site’s strategic plan to mitigate the spread of false information, among other things. With respect to a social media Internet Web site that utilizes factcheckers to verify the accuracy of news stories, the bill would require the disclosure to state what policies and practices the factcheckers use to determine whether news stories are accurate and what the site does with the content that the factcheckers determine is not accurate.”

 A key problem with Pan’s proposal, among others, is that many of the “fact checking” organizations which are on the list to consult are politically biased, as a number of studies, including those by George Mason University have revealed.

Ben Kamisar, writing in The Hill describes how the use of biased fact checking is becoming an increased challenge to free speech: “Conservative groups are crying foul after discovering that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is helping YouTube decide what content is too offensive for the video platform.”

Kyle Smith, in a National Review article, describes SPLC: “ SPLC… spends far more on direct-mail fundraising pleas ($10 million) than it ever has on legal services, according to an analysis by Philanthropy Roundtable, and has never passed along more than 31 percent of its funding to charitable programs, sometimes as little as 18 percent. Meanwhile it has built itself a palatial six-story headquarters and an endowment of more than $200 million. In essence it is a machine for turning leftist hysteria into cash that portrays itself as a non-partisan, fact-finding group and has long been treated as such by media institutions such as the Washington Post and the New York Times.”

A spinal manipulation should never be attempted by anyone other than a licensed Doctor of Chiropractic buy pfizer viagra or Osteopathy. Pomegranates aid longevity, reduce heart disease and strokes, reverse the buildup of arterial plaque, and reduce best online viagra blood sugar level. And with Kamagra Polo, you viagra sildenafil canada have got what you always wished and prayed for. It may have aspect consequences devensec.com price for levitra which are life threatening. Consortium News’ Robert Parry writes:  the [NY] Times gives no thought to the potential downside of having a select group of mainstream journalistic entities feeding their judgment about what is true and what is not into some algorithms that would then scrub the Internet of contrary items. Since the Times is a member of the Google-funded First Draft Coalition – along with other mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post… this idea of eliminating information that counters what the group asserts is true may seem quite appealing to the Times and the other insiders. After all, it might seem cool to have some high-tech tool that silences your critics automatically. But you don’t need a huge amount of imagination to see how this combination of mainstream groupthink and artificial intelligence could create an Orwellian future in which only one side of a story gets told and the other side simply disappears from view.”

While federal bureaucratic assaults on free speech, particularly from the FCC which, during the Obama years actually sought to impose government “monitors” in newsrooms and concocted schemes to regulate conservative news outlets have diminished, the threat continues. The Washington Examiner’s  Paul Bedard found that “Democratic efforts on the Federal Election Commission to punish media and stifle voices like the Drudge Report and Fox are going ‘underground’ after failing in public, according to the agency’s outgoing defender of media and digital outlets… Lee Goodman… ‘The desire to regulate Americans’ political speech on the internet remains alive and well here at the commission and now even in Congress,’ added Goodman.”

More chilling than the question of bias, however, is the central concept behind Pan’s proposal, and others like it.  Despite the existence of the First Amendment and centuries of precedent, Pan, like other leftist politicians, pundits and academics, assume that they have the right to pass laws or enact measures that regulate free speech.

Photo: U.S. National Archives

 

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The Continuous Attack on Free Speech

A  federal judge has rejected UC Berkeley’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit based on the University’s discriminatory policy against conservative speakers. The court battle highlights the growing trend among many universities, as well as other leftist institutions and social media outlets, to stifle those who dissent from leftist orthodoxy.

America is dealing with the signature legacy of the eight years coinciding with the Obama presidency, namely, the attempted removal of First Amendment protections from conservatives.

It could be seen in President Obama’s influencing of the Federal Communications Commission to attempt to place monitors in news rooms, and his transfer of control of the internet to an international body not devoted to free speech. It could be observed in his rather embarrassing attacks on news outlets that disagree with his policies. A description of President Obama’s initial reaction to contrary opinion was described in 2009 by Spectator magazine:

“The Obama Administration declared war on the minority of media outlets that do not worship the political left’s newest false idol immediately after Obama was sworn in. Three days into his presidency Obama warned Congressional Republicans against listening to radio host Rush Limbaugh…Then the White House launched a jihad against Fox News Channel and its hosts by first boycotting appearances on the cable channel and then second, by engaging in name-calling and leveling baseless allegations… the White House brazenly attempted to marginalize Fox News Channel by enlisting the support of the heretofore compliant news media. Fortunately, competing news outlets found the backbone — if only temporarily — to put the kibosh on Obama’s attempts to blacklist FNC from the White House press pool.”

Attorney General Loretta Lynch considered criminally prosecuting those who merely disagreed with Obama’s climate change views. Senator Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation which specifically and openly sought to limit the First Amendment regarding paid political speech. The Internal Revenue Service attacked conservative organizations. Leftist state attorneys general engaged in harassing legal tactics against dissidents. Social media initiated various methods to silence conservative users. And, of course, universities adopted a variety of tactics to eliminate non-leftist influence within both the faculty and the student body.

The pronounced drive to stifle the right has emphasized different issues at different times, sometimes with proposed government actions, at other times with the use of inflammatory language. Attempts to ensure that predominately liberal institutions had more influence in general elections manifested itself in increasingly restrictive “campaign reform” measures. Labeling any opposition to the most extreme race and gender-baiting tactics of the left as “hate speech” is currently in vogue. Those attempting to limit so-called poverty programs that have failed for over half a century are attacked for their “heartlessness.” Those seeking to protect the Second Amendment are portrayed as being in favor of mass murder.

If you are impotence, it is very unlikely that you get more than a couple of inches for that matter. buy cheap sildenafil This increases the blood free get viagra in the reproductive organs and cures weak erection and premature ejaculation. The sildenafil free shipping Qualities that is good and Associated With Erectile dysfunction measure. You are able to mix the herbal male enhancement drug you need to look at cialis generic is normally oral, approximately 60 minutes before the sexual act. However, differences of opinion, no matter how harsh, are not the problem.  Spirited political debate is a good thing. What is truly concerning is the goal of far too many on the left to criminalize the right for having a different opinion, and the lock-step acquiescence of institutions to that attempt.

Journalist Caroline Glick  wrote:  “The fact is that the attempts of leftist activists on campuses to silence non-leftist dissenters…is simply an extreme version of what is increasingly becoming standard operating procedure for leftist activists throughout the US. Rather than participating in a battle of ideas with their ideological opponents on the Right, increasingly, leftist activists, groups and policy-makers seek to silence their opponents through slander, intimidation and misrepresentation of their own agenda.”

Perhaps the most important analysis of the attempt to silence non-leftist speech comes not from a conservative, but from a journalist closely associated with liberal politics. Kirsten Powers served in the Clinton Administration and was a fixture in Democrat politics in New York.  She provides one the most bluntly honest and hard-hitting analyses of this problem:

“This intolerance,” she writes, “is not a passive matter of opinion. It’s an aggressive, illiberal impulse to silence people.  This conduct has become an existential threat to those who hold orthodox religious beliefs… increasingly I hear from people across the political spectrum who are fearful not only of expressing their views, but also as to where all of this is heading.  I’ve followed this trend closely as a columnist with growing concern.  It’s become clear that the attempts—too often successful—to silence dissent from the liberal worldview isn’t isolated outbursts. They are part of a bigger story.”

Mark Pulliam, writing in the New York Post describes a disturbing recent example: “…would-be brownshirts let the mask slip when they disrupted and attempted to shout down a speaker at the City University of New York School of Law….South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman arrived on campus to discuss … ‘The Importance of Free Speech on Campus,’…The episode is deeply disturbing … the audience was not made up of undergraduates. This was a lecture at a law school… Yet the numerous signs waved by the protesters contained such slogans as ‘Rule of Law equals White Supremacy’ and ‘The First Amendment is Not a Licence [sic] to Dehumanize Marginalized People.’ Students shouted ‘Legal objectivity is a myth’ and ‘F – – k the law.’ CUNY Law’s National Lawyers Guild chapter tweeted that ‘free speech’ activists are ‘not welcome at our PUBLIC INTEREST school.’

The Report Concludes Tomorrow

Photo: U.S. National Archives

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Fighting Social Media Censorship

Conservatives are constrained in their attempts to overcome the censorship of social media sites.

Strict devotion to the First Amendment, and opposition to internet regulation prevents them from advocating for government intervention or oversight. Unlike their opponents on the left, they do not believe that any form of speech should be subjected to government control.

The issue is of crucial importance. There is little doubt that the internet is a decisive force in the 21stcentury American politics.  The Pew Research Center  found that 62% of American adults get news from social media. An NYU research project notes that “Our study of search engines suggests that they systematically exclude… certain types of sites in favor of others… giving prominence to some at the expense of others.”

The internet research organization Can I Rank reports that Google “search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a “Left” or “Far Left” slant…Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results…the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.”

The issue began to garner an even greater degree of note when, as reported by Lifesite “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai scolded Twitter…for censoring conservative users of its platform…’ The company has a viewpoint…and uses that viewpoint to discriminate…to say the least, the company appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users…’”

In 2016, writes Robby Soave in the New York Post, “Twitter…formed the Orwellian-named ‘Trust and Safety Council’ to propose changes to the company’s use policies… practically none of the 40 people chosen to be part of the council are all that concerned about free speech…”
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Some have taken to the courts for relief reports Max Greenwood in The Hill. Political consultant Roger Stone has filed a lawsuit against internet giant Twitter, an institution that has been noted for harassing conservative accounts. Twitter gained a great deal of notoriety when one of its employees cut off President Trump’s account. Twitter has openly “purged” conservative accounts on occasion. Similarly, You Tube and its parent corporation Google have been sued by the right-leaning educational site PragerU for censoring its online videos. The blatant nature of You Tube’s bias can easily be discerned by the organization’s use of an extreme left-wing group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, to decide what constitutes “offensive” speech.

Selwyn Duke proposes in The Hill using antitrust laws, but that runs into conservative objections as well.  “I may object to such things. But here’s the issue: if antitrust laws are unjust, eliminate them. But if we’re going to have them, they should be applied where most needed. As for Google, most people admit it’s ‘a de facto monopoly.’ The breakup of AT&T’s Bell System was mandated in 1982. That came even without Bell denying service to people, blocking their calls or hiding their phone numbers based on the content of their conversations.”

There may be another alternative. Conservatives rightly objected to the dangers of government control inherent in classifying internet providers as “common carriers.”  But, traveling a path as precise as threading a needle, a modified version of the common carrier concept could be applied without the overlay of government control that proponents of the concept maintain is necessary for the more physical world of trains and planes.  That highly modified common carrier concept could warrant—without any other government intrusion, regulation, or oversight– that monopolistic internet giants such as Twitter and Google treat all users equally.

This article, written by Editor-in-Chief Frank Vernuccio, originally appeared in the Washington Times. 

Dept.of Commerce photo

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The Campaign Against Free Speech

There is a specific and clear message that many elite journalists, internet giants, academics, and politicians are delivering to the American people: “You are too stupid to understand objective reporting or use free speech the right way, so we will decide for you what can and cannot be reported or said. The First Amendment no longer applies to you!”

The message comes from a variety of sources. On CNN, which has become infamous for slanting its reporting in so extreme a manner during the past several years and especially during the 2016 presidential campaign that detractors have nicknamed it the “Clinton News Network,” celebrated reporter Carl Bernstein, reports RealClearPolitics, stated that President Trump was a “Malignant” president and that “reporters needed to change the way they cover him…It calls on our journalists to do a different kind of reporting, a different kind of dealing with this presidency and the president of the United States.”

CNN has also reported that it “outed” the Reddit user that put together the “gif” of Trump wrestling that network’s image, who subsequently “apologized” for his exercise in free speech not approved by the media elites. CNN has apparently taken lessons from totalitarian states that gleefully force dissenters to recant.

Perhaps CNN derives its contempt for free speech from the nation’s academic institutions, where American history is barely taught, perhaps because the concepts enshrined in the Bill of Rights are just too dangerous for elites who wish to rule without interference.

That contempt is leading to lawsuits, Campus Reform reports. Three students at Kellogg Community College in Michigan were arrested for handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution. “The manager of Student Life, Drew Hutchinson, asked them to stop because they might “obstruct the student’s ability to get an education…this was…too much for school administrators who insisted the three were in violation of the school’s draconian solicitation policies. They called the Kalamazoo police and the Chief of Police himself came to arrest the activists for trespassing. Now, Brandon Withers… who was with the activists that afternoon, is suing the college. A press release from his lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom says: ‘The problem is that KCC’s speech policy, what they call a ‘Solicitation Policy,’ regulates a wide variety of student expression. Things such as leafleting, assemblies, speeches, and circulating petitions are all greatly restricted, but they also happen to be protected by the First Amendment.”

Kellogg University’s actions are not an isolated incident within higher education. The University of California is being sued for First Amendment violations for its actions in blocking conservative-minded speakers from appearing on campus. There are numerous other examples throughout academia—and not only at the university level.

The growing opposition to free speech on the part of the Progressive left is increasingly organized and well-funded.

The Washington Examiner reports that “The former chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, [FEC] who famously eyed regulating the politics of conservative outlets like the Drudge Report, has joined an advocacy group funded by George Soros and run by his son. Ann Ravel is the first fellow listed with the California advocacy group New America. Her fellowship began in March and pays a $30,000 stipend…Since leaving the FEC, Ravel has continued to speak out for more election regulation, especially on the internet where she sees political advertising shifting to in the next presidential contest. She has applauded calls for regulating political speech and spending on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and this week endorsed tracing the funding of online ads and regulating individual Twitter accounts.”

During President Obama’s tenure in office, there were numerous attempts to use the FEC and various campaign regulatory statutes as a stealth attack on free speech.  Many of the moves were brazen, such as that by New York Senator Charles Schumer’s proposed legislation that would begin the process of weakening First Amendment protections regarding paid political speech.  Democrat members of the FEC have also sought to bring certain web sites under its jurisdiction.

During the prior eight years, significant attacks on free speech included:

  • The Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to place federal monitors in newsrooms;
  • openly considered criminal prosecution of anyone disagreeing with Obama’s views on climate change;
  • placing the internet under international control (which would permit censorship,);
  • Using Internal Revenue Service has been used a bludgeon against groups opposing White House policies; and
  • The Justice Department seized telephone records of Fox news reporters.

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In 2014, the Society of Professional Journalists  protested in a letter to the Obama White House about “politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies. Recent research has indicated the problem is getting worse throughout the nation, particularly at the federal level. Journalists are reporting that most federal agencies prohibit their employees from communicating with the press unless the bosses have public relations staffers sitting in on the conversations…Reporters seeking interviews are expected to seek permission, often providing questions in advance. Delays can stretch for days, longer than most deadlines allow… Agencies hold on-background press conferences with unnamed officials, on a not-for-attribution basis. In many cases, this is clearly being done to control what information journalists – and the audience they serve – have access to. A survey found 40 percent of public affairs officers admitted they blocked certain reporters because they did not like what they wrote.”

The attack on free speech also occurs in more subtle ways, especially in that increasingly vital marketplace of ideas, the internet. Search engines giants have tailored their search results to omit results or obscure or delete comments that do not conform to leftist orthodoxy.  The internet research organization Can I Rank found that  “top search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a “Left” or “Far Left” slant than they were pages from the right. Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results. Our analysis of the algorithmic metrics underpinning those rankings suggests that factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.” The study found that 16% of political keyword searches yielded no conservative-oriented pages within the initial search results.

The U.S. nearing a dangerous turning point, in which not only is free speech endangered, but also the very means to generate free speech is endangered. From academia’s relentless drive to indoctrinate students against the nation’s founding principles, to the establishment media’s actions in warping its reporting, to the actions by bureaucrats and elected officials alike to regulate and intimidate against the exercise of First Amendment rights, America’s most cherished freedom has become an endangered species.

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Internet Bias Distorts News, Part 3

The New York Analysis of Policy and Government concludes its examination of political bias on the internet. 

The political bias of the Google search engine, as well as social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, is clearly established. Is there a solution?

Some have suggested that government intervene to establish some standards of fairness. That is a cure worse than the disease. One of the prime goals of an independent media is to act as a check on government. It would not take long for the temptation to warp reporting in favor of incumbents to set in.  Indeed, during the eight years of the Obama Administration, there were numerous attempts to limit the ability of government critics, especially conservatives, to operate independent of federal interference.

The only safe and viable solution is to insure that competing search engines and social media sites, which should be developed by both responsible journalists as well as those who have been discriminated against by Google, Facebook, or Twitter, have a level playing field in which to operate. Cathy Young, writing for The Hill, notes that “If established social networks are increasingly perceived as inhospitable to conservatives or libertarians, there will inevitably be stepped-up initiatives to create alternative platforms—which would have no shortage of potential Silicon Valley backers…”

The Fee.org website suggests that “If Google is underserving its users, then that underservice is a golden opportunity. Google’s hold on its current users is weak: Entrepreneurs can capitalize on Google’s weakness, creating new search engines that steal away those dissatisfied customers with the promise of better service…”

Despite Google’s current dominance, this is not impossible. As Fee notes,  “In the 1990s, Yahoo! dominated the search engine market. In the early 2000s, MySpace dominated social media. Both benefitted from network effects. Both were taken down, not by rival giants with networks of their own, but by a few college kids creating something more effective and desirable.”

Some type of erectile dysfunction is experienced by: 40 percent of each of the 40-year-olds 50 percent of each of the characters faces are a true testomony to the talent of Ms. cialis canada cheap Impotence condition in men is sometimes caused due to psychological issues including stress and anxiety. cialis cheap Some babies spit out food first few times, which is no prescription viagra completely normal. His Japanese meets American style of work levitra on line sale is idolised around the world, and he is known in many tattoo circles as “The Godfather of Modern Tattoo”. Alternatives also exist to currently dominant social media sites.   Natural News  lists several existing alternatives, and reveals that others are currently being planned for those who “are sick and tired of the…censorship of either your posts or those of real news organizations that Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and others have arbitrarily deemed ‘fake’…these current and forthcoming sites are true free speech zones where you can say and post what you want, without the fear that it will be censored.”

Among the sites listed: GoodGopher.com, which specializes in science topics; GAB.ai
“Developed by free-speech advocate Andrew Torba, GAB.ai is a Twitter-style network that combats censorship by allowing users to post whatever they want, saying what they want and expressing themselves as they want” and Seen.life, a social media site also dedicated free speech and the promise of enhanced privacy.

There are alternatives to Google, such as Bing. However, they have not attained the general acceptance or widespread contacts that have made Google the powerhouse in its fields.

Until a viable alternative is developed, there are ways to get around Google’s search engine bias while doing research. Education Week found that students were not proficient in discriminating between biased reporting and actual news. They suggested the following strategy, which astute fact-checkers employ:

“Fact-checkers use the vast resources of the Internet to determine where information is coming from before they read it… They don’t evaluate a site based solely on the description it provides about itself… fact-checkers look past the order of search results. Instead of trusting Google to sort pages by reliability (which reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how Google works), the checkers mined URLs and abstracts for clues. They regularly scrolled down to the bottom of the search results page in their quest to make an informed decision about where to click first.”

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Internet Bias Distorts News, Part 2

The New York Analysis of Policy and Government continues its review of internet bias.

The Journal, “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America” (PNAS) warns that “search engine companies… could affect—and perhaps are already affecting—the outcomes of close elections worldwide. Restricting search ranking manipulations to voters who have been identified as undecided while also donating money to favored candidates would be an especially subtle, effective, and efficient way of wielding influence…manipulation of search rankings might exert a disproportionately large influence over voters for four reasons: First…the process by which search rankings affect voter preferences might interact synergistically with the process by which voter preferences affect search rankings, thus creating a sort of digital bandwagon effect that magnifies the potential impact of even minor search ranking manipulations. Second, campaign influence is usually explicit, but search ranking manipulations are not. Such manipulations are difficult to detect, and most people are relatively powerless when trying to resist sources of influence they cannot see … Of greater concern in the present context, when people are unaware they are being manipulated, they tend to believe they have adopted their new thinking voluntarily … Third, candidates normally have equal access to voters, but this need not be the case with search engine manipulations. Because the majority of people in most democracies use a search engine provided by just one company, if that company chose to manipulate rankings to favor particular candidates or parties, opponents would have no way to counteract those manipulations…Finally, with the attention of voters shifting rapidly toward the Internet and away from traditional sources of information…the potential impact of search engine rankings on voter preferences will inevitably grow over time, as will the influence of people who have the power to control such rankings.”

Internet  manipulation of the news has raised concern of both those favoring objective coverage as well as those conservatives who have been victimized by left-leaning search engines and social media sites.  The Washington Times reported how two top websites moved to “suppress information about the Orlando mass shooter’s ties to the Islamic State, just days after Google was accused of burying negative stories about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Even as companies like Facebook and Google deny any institutional political bias, conservatives like Less Government’s Seton Motley say that Silicon Valley’s liberal titans apparently can’t help themselves.”

A study  by  Ronald E. Robertson of Northeastern University,  Samantha J. Shepherd and Shu Zhang  of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology found that “between May and November 2016, search results displayed in response to a wide range of election-related search terms were, on average, biased in Mrs. Clinton’s favor in all 10 search-result positions. This bias could not be accounted for by the bias in the search terms themselves. We also found different levels of bias in different search engines, as well as evidence of demographically-targeted bias. We don’t know what caused these patterns of bias, but no matter what the cause or causes, given the power of search rankings to shift votes and opinions without people’s awareness they are a matter for concern.”

Conservatives have justifiably criticized social media cites as well as search engines.
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Michael Nunez, reporting in Gizmodo writes that “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.”  Citing a former Facebook “news curator,” Nunez describes how topics embarrassing to the left were censored out. “Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. ‘I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,’ the former curator said.”

Twitter has similarly sought to limit conservative use of its site, notes Breitbart. According to the analysis, Twitter maintains a “blacklist” of accounts, consisting of  conservative users who have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

You Tube has also been charged with censorship, but of a less restrictive type. According to the Daily Wire “YouTube, which is owned by…Google, has displayed its nasty bias against conservative thought, banning the influential law website Legal Insurrection from posting on the channel…. YouTube’s bias is becoming clearer and clearer; in October the channel started censoring videos produced by Prager University; 21 Prager University videos were placed by Google under ‘restricted mode,’ which limited access to them for many schools and families.”

The Report concludes tomorrow.

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Internet Bias Distorts News

The New York Analysis of Policy and Government presents a three-part examination of the political bias found on search engines and social media sites.

There is little doubt that the internet is a powerful, and perhaps decisive, force in the 21st century American political environment.  According to a study by the Pew Research Center  “A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media…”

But as the role of internet as a principal source of information expands, there is justifiable concern about the accuracy and objectivity of the information presented.  Search Engine Watch notes that “Search engines may think of themselves as being objective but like any other media company, editorial judgements are made and are factored into automated operations. Engines trust certain sources more than others”

An NYU research project found that “search engines raise not merely technical issues but also political ones. Our study of search engines suggests that they systematically exclude (in some cases by design and in some, accidentally) certain sites and certain types of sites in favor of others, systematically giving prominence to some at the expense of others.”

The problem of using the internet as a source of news or general information has been noted by those using it for not just general research but for specific professional purposes as well. A Forbes study reports that “Social media like Facebook and Twitter  are far too biased to be used blindly by social science researchers, two computer scientists have warned. Writing in…Science, Carnegie Mellon’s Juergen Pfeffer and McGill’s Derek Ruths have warned that scientists are treating the wealth of data gathered by social networks as a goldmine of what people are thinking – but frequently they aren’t correcting for inherent biases in the dataset.”
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The issue is of overwhelming importance. Kalev Leetaru wrote in Forbes that “Far from democratizing how we access the world’s information, the web has in fact narrowed those information sources. Much as large national chains and globalization have replaced the local mom-and-pop shop with the megastore and local craftsmanship with assembly line production, the internet is centralizing information access from a myriad websites and local newspapers and radio/television shows to single behemoth social platforms that wield universal global control over what we consume. Indeed, social media platforms appear to increasingly view themselves no longer as neural publishing platforms but rather as active mediators and curators of what we see. This extends even to new services like messaging. David Marcus, Facebook’s Vice President of Messaging recently told Wired: “Unlike email where there is no one safeguarding the quality and the quantity of the stuff you receive, we’re here in the middle to protect the quality and integrity of your messages and to ensure that you’re not going to get a lot of stuff you don’t want.” In short, Facebook wants to act as an intelligent filter onto what we see of the world. The problem is that any filter by design must emphasize some content and views at the expense of others.”

Robert Schlesinger, writing for U.S. News,  explains that “while big social media – be it Facebook or Google News – has news-purveying components they’re not news organizations as such and don’t have news missions. They’re part of larger companies with agendas that don’t necessarily include fairly informing the citizenry. And they have real power, regardless of whether they’re using it or not.”

The internet research organization Can I Rank found that “Although internet search engines like Google play an increasingly prominent role shaping voter opinions and perception of issues and candidates, their ranking algorithms aren’t designed to provide a fairly balanced or completely honest representation of controversial issues…Among our key findings were that top search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a “Left” or “Far Left” slant than they were pages from the right. Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results. Our analysis of the algorithmic metrics underpinning those rankings suggests that factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.” The study found that 16% of political keyword searches yielded no conservative-oriented pages within the initial search results.

The Report continues tomorrow.