Censorship

RESTON, VA – Media Research Center (MRC) Senior Fellow LTC Allen B. West (USA, Ret) issued the following statement Tuesday concerning Facebook’s community guidelines publicly released earlier today. LTC West serves as MRC’s primary spokesperson for its Censorship Project. 

Conservatives have good reason to be worried about Facebook. Newly published information about the site’s Community Standards, which guide what content is allowed and what is prohibited, shows it has vague restrictions on what it deems to be “hate speech” and “hate organizations.” It also discusses how the site will handle “false news” and raises concerns about the groups that it partners with.…

Bumble, a dating app that claims to be women-centered, has made another round of donations to Planned Parenthood. This followed last month’s move to ban gun photos on the app.

A Scottish YouTuber has been fined after being found guilty of being “grossly offensive” online for uploading a video of his girlfriend’s pug responding to “sieg heil” and “gas the Jews.”

A new poll by the Pew Research Center shows a majority of Americans do not believe the government should rein in the spread of fake news.

A 19-year-old from Liverpool was reportedly found guilty of sending a “grossly offensive message” when she posted rap lyrics on her Instagram account. Prosecutors reportedly increased the teenager’s sentence “as it was a hate crime.”

A resident of the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn was reportedly banned from Facebook for 30 days for discussing the problem of black-on-Jewish crime in the area.  

With over 6 million subscribers, Philip DeFranco is one of the most prolific and popular YouTubers. The site’s lack of transparency when it comes to demonetization, however, is driving him and many other YouTubers away. DeFranco, like other YouTubers, also claimed his videos are being suppressed by internal YouTube algorithms.  

In a Monday appearance on Fox News Channel’s The Ingraham Angle, MRC founder and president Brent Bozell ripped into the liberal tech giants for censoring conservative thought on their social media platforms. “This is emerging, the greatest censorship of free speech worldwide in the history of man,” he exclaimed, referring to the findings of the blockbuster study conducted by the MRC’s Ashley Rae…

Saturday was, as Katie Yoder at NewsBusters noted Tuesday afternoon, a "sad day." That's when the Women's March sprang to the defense of Backpage.com, tweeting that its Friday seizure by the Justice Department "is an absolute crisis for sex workers." In that same tweet, the group declared that "Sex workers rights are women’s rights." Backpage and seven associated individuals were indicted Monday…

The political highlight Tuesday was the joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees where Senators grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his company’s conduct for hours. Of course, a focus for three major liberal news networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) was the probing questions regarding the information allegedly used in the 2016 election. But they ignored questions by Senators…

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg grappled with questions of all stripes at Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the social media platform and the 2016 election, but it was Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse’s questions about hate speech that should alarm free speech advocates. Along with inquiries from Texas Republican Ted Cruz, Sasse stood out.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg ran smack into questions about the site’s neutrality during his testimony in front of members of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) questioned Zuckerberg, asking if the site is a neutral platform for people to express different political opinions. Zuckerberg said he is “very committed to making sure that Facebook is a platform for all…