Facebook Algorithm Flags The Declaration Of Independence As “Hate Speech”

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 17:42
VIEWED: 2992
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SIGNYM

Friday, July 6, 2018 4:50 AM

I thought this was interesting

Quote:
Over the last couple of years major social media, news and video platforms have been actively engaged in the censorship of what they believe to be fake news and information. Often spearheaded by third-party review organizations known to have biased views, there have been countless examples of unpopular speech and commentary that has seen its distribution suppressed or outright banned.

While there is most certainly a human element involved in the review and flagging of information, mega Silicon Valley conglomerates have also implemented automated systems to identify potentially hateful and repulsive content.

To give you an idea of the kind of automation in play and what words and ideas are being identified as running contrary to the principles of media aggregators and distributors, consider that Facebook recently banned America’s founding document from being posted.

Since June 24, the Liberty County Vindicator of Liberty County, Texas, has been sharing daily excerpts from the declaration in the run up to July Fourth. The idea was to encourage historical literacy among the Vindicator‘s readers.

The first nine such posts of the project went up without incident.

“But part 10,” writes Vindicator managing editor Casey Stinnett, “did not appear. Instead, The Vindicator received a notice from Facebook saying that the post ‘goes against our standards on hate speech.'”

The post in question contained paragraphs 27 through 31 of the Declaration of Independence, the grievance section of the document wherein the put-upon colonists detail all the irreconcilable differences they have with King George III.

Stinnett says that he cannot be sure which exact grievance ran afoul of Facebook’s policy, but he assumes that it’s paragraph 31, which excoriates the King for inciting “domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.”

The removal of the post was an automated action, and Stinnett sent a “feedback message” to Facebook with the hopes of reaching a human being who could then exempt the Declaration of Independence from its hate speech restrictions.

The Vindicator took a screenshot of the post’s removal:

According to the Vindicator, the post was eventually restored after it was manually reviewed.

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/facebook-algorithm-flags-the-dec
laration-of-independence-as-hate-speech_07042018

JJ

Sunday, July 8, 2018 1:43 AM

Facebook algorithms were apparently alerted to the use of the phrase "Indian savages" in one part of the Declaration of Independence in one scheduled Facebook post in July 2018, and that post was automatically withheld from publication for about one day.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-declaration-of-independence
-hate-speech/

T

SIGNYM

Sunday, July 8, 2018 2:23 AM

Which shows that either

1) The Founding Fathers' phraseology wouldn't pass muster with today's ethics, or
2) Algorithms are imperfect tools, and one should not trust "censorship" to them, or
3) Both of the above

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

As long as you insist that everything is the Republicans'/ Democrats' fault, then you fail to grasp the REAL problem with American politics.

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Sunday, July 8, 2018 2:29 PM

You guys are Racists!! for sure.

REAVERFAN

Sunday, July 8, 2018 8:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Which shows that either

1) The Founding Fathers' phraseology wouldn't pass muster with today's ethics, or
2) Algorithms are imperfect tools, and one should not trust "censorship" to them, or
3) Both of the above

The founding fathers were indeed racists. Everybody was. They enslaved and killed brown people all day long.

Algorithms are indeed imperfect tools, and are frequently manipulated by Russian bots, as Sig inadvertently showed us in the "walk away" thread.

REAVERFAN

Thursday, July 12, 2018 7:52 PM

Facebook touts fight on fake news, but struggles to explain why InfoWars isn't banned
https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/11/media/facebook-infowars/index.html

When asked by this reporter how the company could claim it was serious about tackling the problem of misinformation online while simultaneously allowing InfoWars to maintain a page with nearly one million followers on its website, Hegeman said that the company does not "take down false news."

"I guess just for being false that doesn't violate the community standards," Hegeman said, explaining that InfoWars has "not violated something that would result in them being taken down."

Hegeman added, "I think part of the fundamental thing here is that we created Facebook to be a place where different people can have a voice. And different publishers have very different points of view."

While publishers may certainly have a different point of view, InfoWars is no ordinary publisher, and the content it produces does not just offer "different points of view." The media organization is notorious for spreading demonstrably false information and conspiracy theories on a host of issues, including suggesting that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax staged by child actors. Earlier this year, the outlet smeared student survivors of the Parkland shooting with baseless attacks, portraying them in one video as actors.

FB is also increasing the amount of Fox News coming through. So much for fighting fake news.

Fox News will be featured in Facebook's news coverage twice as much as any other outlet
http://theweek.com/speedreads/784362/fox-news-featured-facebooks-news-
coverage-twice-much-other-outlet

More and more useless by the day.

JAYNEZTOWN

Wednesday, December 14, 2022 11:00 PM

The Fifth Estate

https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-fifth-estate

SECOND

Wednesday, December 14, 2022 11:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
The Fifth Estate

https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-fifth-estate

In case you don't want to click the link or, if you did click, did not wish to subscribe to "Pirate Wires", here is the post, minus pictures and still more links that don't really help understand what point is being made about Twitter and Elon Musk:

The Fifth Estate
Mike Solana
13–16 minutes

Long story short, Pirate Wires exists because people subscribe. If you’re into what we’re doing here, drag your friends on board for a free sub, and if you haven’t yet already: Subscribe, or die.

Dangerous alliance. In 1787, Edmund Burke said there were “Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there [sits] a Fourth Estate more important than they all." The notion of some vital power beyond our government was imported to the New World, and today constitutes a core belief of the American liberal: there is no free people, we’re often told, without a free press independent of congress, the courts, and our president. But throughout the 20th Century thousands of media outlets gradually consolidated, and by the dawn of our internet era only a few giants remained. These giants largely shared a single perspective, and in rough agreement with the ruling class the Fourth Estate naturally came to serve, rather than critique, power. This relationship metastasized into something very close to authoritarianism during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single state narrative was written by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a fifth and final fount of power in the newly-dominant technology industry.

It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.

A couple weeks back, alleging proof Twitter acted with gross political bias, and in a manner that influenced U.S. elections (!), Elon Musk opened his new company’s internal communications to a small handful of journalists. They set immediately to breaking a series of major stories that have rewritten the history of Trump-era tech. Long story short, Twitter leadership lied to the public, relentlessly, for years, and everything the most paranoid among us ever said about the platform was true. “Trust and safety” is a euphemism for political censorship, with “expert” teams comprised almost exclusively of the most radical, joyless grievance studies majors you ever met in college. Their goal is to reshape American politics by dominating the bounds of what the public is permitted to consider American politics. In these efforts, they have mostly been succeeding.

On December 2nd, Matt Taibbi shared conversations from the company’s “trust and safety” team that led to Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s infamous Hunter Biden laptop story. While interesting, Taibbi’s most notable revelation came almost as a side: both major political parties, as well as the White House, maintained direct lines of communication with Twitter, which they used to formally request content be removed from the platform. The company responded enthusiastically to many of these requests, and the examples we have (for now) come from the Democratic Party. Critics have been quick to point out Trump was in the White House at the time, though less interested, for some reason, in what — if anything — he removed from the site.

On December 6th, Bari Weiss and her colleagues reported out proof of Twitter’s secret blacklists, in which both specific topics and, more problematically, people were de-amplified by the “trust and safety” team. The blacklisting was done for a nebulous host of reasons that generally amounted to something like ‘this feels dangerous.’ Danger was, of course, defined by partisan operatives, and exclusively targeted right-coded positions. Skepticism of radical gender ideology, distrust of

SECOND

Thursday, December 15, 2022 12:15 AM

Twitter Suspends @ElonJet, Even Though Elon Musk Said He Wouldn't Ban It

“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, [@ElonJet] even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted on Nov. 7.

That commitment didn’t last long. In the meantime, @ElonJet remains available on Facebook and Instagram, so Musk accomplished nothing other than showing he is wealthy and strong enough to break any promise he makes.

The incident underscores how quickly Twitter’s new owner can change his mind when it comes to content moderation. In late October, for example, Musk said Twitter would only unban accounts after the company established a content moderation council. But in November, Musk reinstated former President Trump’s account after polling Twitter users about what he should do.

This past week, Musk also abruptly dissolved a Trust and Safety Council that Twitter had originally established in 2016.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/twitter-suspends-at-elonjet-even-though-elo
n-musk-said-he-wouldnt-ban-it

There is an article explaining why Musk acts the way he does. Musk is following a well-established pattern (the arbitrary capriciousness of wealthy owners) found in a book whose author Ronald Reagan praised during his Presidency.
https://www.vox.com/23505311/elon-musk-twitter-managerial-woke-james-b
urnham

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

JAYNEZTOWN

Tuesday, August 25, 2026 5:42 PM

student data and the elite brand and outside investments

The Rabbi Rumor that Connects Facebook to Zionist Elites | Professor Jiang

Danny Jones Clips