Can social media censor content? Google does it. So does FB and Twitter

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, September 21, 2025 14:48
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Microsoft says “tank man” image blocking due to human error

HONG KONG (AP) — Microsoft Corp. blamed “accidental human error” for its Bing search engine briefly not showing image results for the search term “tank man” on the anniversary of the bloody military crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Users in different parts of the world, including the U.S., said Friday that no image results were returned when they searched for the term “tank man.”

After being alerted by reporters, Microsoft said in a statement that the issue was “due to an accidental human error and has been resolved.” Hours later, images of “tank man” photographs were returned by the search engine.

The company did not elaborate on what the human error was or how it had happened. Nor did it say how much of its Bing development team is China-based. The company’s largest research and development center outside the United States is in China, and it posted a job in January for a China-based senior software engineer to lead a team that develops the technology powering Bing image search.

https://apnews.com/article/censorship-technology-business-d35d9e63ac9d
563d0e064e72ea931d69

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All search engines have censoring capacity.

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India asks Twitter to follow tough new social media laws

https://apnews.com/article/india-social-media-media-business-technolog
y-d6659c662132bef782dada3d3afef16c

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But censorship would NEVER happen in the US!

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FB now officially gives itself permission to censor any and all politicians' political 'free' speech:

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Reports: Facebook to end rule exemptions for politicians

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-government-and-politics-techno
logy-business-834bf8c29aeaa10276272c5ca4b112b1

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Next comes differential enforcement ...

... So, now that FB has given itself permission to practice wholesale censorship ...

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Facebook suspends Trump for 2 years, then will reassess

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-government-and-politics-techno
logy-business-f7d165898d2b79e86c9fe15f36384b18

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What is the banning for, exactly?

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... following a finding that Trump stoked violence ahead of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

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This looks like a full-court press to ban political speech ... oh, and propagandize us at the same time.

First the propaganda - calling Jan 6, 2021 an 'insurrection', instead of say - a protest, or even a riot. I have to say the standards the m$m uses to pick and choose between protest, riot, and insurrection are remarkably flexible!!! BLM 'protests' are 'mostly peaceful', no matter how many buildings go up in flames in fires set by the 'protesters', or how many people were hurt by the 'protesters', or how much public and private area was taken over by the 'protesters', how many people were killed by the 'protesters'. But the protest at the Capitol was an 'insurrection', even though nobody brought guns, and the protesters killed exactly zero people. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/07/capitol-riot-d
eaths-cause-death-released-4-5-not-sicknick/7128040002/

But that's just a minor point in the larger discussion about free speech in the US.

Why ban Trump entirely? Why for 2 years?

If FB's concern is that Trump would violate their standards (because, according to FB, calling for PEACEFUL and PATRIOTIC presence is too extreme) why not simply subject him to individual scrutiny for individual violations? Why should FB ban everything Trump might have to say entirely? I looks to me like FB is either too stupid to think of that, or too technologically inept to carry that out. (Or maybe the truth is it's too politically biased to reasonably enforce its policies.)

As for the 2 years' ban - I have absolutely no evidence that it as anything to do with the mid-term elections. But it looks that way to me.

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If only US politicians had the littlest bit of integrity to do what Europe does:

European regulators launch fresh probes of Facebook, Google
https://apnews.com/article/europe-technology-business-a44f2f093471ffa7
ea8ff8e23f8282da

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Their day of reckoning will come.

It's easy for them to get away with it now when the Media is in lock step with their agendas and everybody can just call people they don't agree with alt-Right, or Nazis, or whatever bullshit words they tell stupid people.

As much as I joke about the Liberal Hivemind, there really isn't such a thing at all. Most of those people hate each other, but it's easy to pretend they don't when they can all scream Orange Man Bad all day long.

Once they start eating their own, Susan, Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey are going to be put on a cross by the very people they've been pandering to.

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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

On May 23, 2017, not so long ago in real time but seemingly an eternity given the extraordinary history we’ve lived through since, a group of 50-odd students at Evergreen State College arrived at the classroom of a biology professor named Bret Weinstein, demanding his resignation. He stepped into the hall to talk, believing he could work things out.

He was wrong. Weinstein’s offense had been to come to work during an event called the “Days of Absence,” in which white students, staff, and faculty were asked to stay home. This was an inverted version of a longstanding Evergreen event of the same name that, based on a Douglas Turner Ward play, invited students of color to stay home voluntarily, to underscore their value to the community. As he would later explain in the Wall Street Journal, Weinstein thought this was a different and more negative message, and refused to comply. When that group of 50 students he’d never met arrived at his door and accused him of being a racist, he assumed he could find common ground, especially when his own students (including students of color) spoke on his behalf.

“I was one of Evergreen’s most popular professors,” he later testified to the House of Representatives. “I had Evergreen’s version of tenure. Did they really think they could force my resignation based on a meritless accusation? They did think that, and they were right.”

Weinstein was a Bernie Sanders supporter who described his politics as unabashedly liberal, even leftist. Like many, he’d grown up steeped in the imagery of sixties protest culture, probably imagined himself on its side, and therefore thought he could find solidarity with protesters. He didn’t realize was that he was the canary in a coal mine for a new movement that understood free speech as a stalking horse for the exercise of institutional power. When Weinstein opened his mouth to defend himself, what the crowd heard was him attempting to exercise authority, and they exercised theirs back.

They’d won over Evergreen’s new president, George Bridges, who refused to intercede in Weinstein’s behalf and later even asked college police to stand down, when protesters began stopping traffic and searching cars for someone, presumably Weinstein. The police told Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety, and ultimately he was, in fact, forced to resign.

Frequently portrayed as the involuntary protagonist of the first of a series of campus free speech crises, in fact Weinstein was one of the first to understand that a rollback of “free speech” in cases like his was incidental to the larger aims of the movement.

“What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control. Speech is impeded as a last resort,” he told the House Oversight Committee.

He described the new movement as like a cult, in which members sincerely believed they were acting to stop oppression, but leaders understood they were simply “turning the tables” on oppression. They were exercising authority to achieve what may be presented as social justice goals, while the actual end is the authority itself, with the teardown of due process and other protections a critical part of the picture. “This committee,” he said, “should take my tale as cautionary.”

Fast forward three years. Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying have become prominent figures in independent media, co-hosting a popular podcast called DarkHorse. Identified in the New York Times as one of the main dramatis personae of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web,” a group of heterodox intellectuals not aligned with the traditional right or left, he appeared for a time to find a home on YouTube. Maybe he would never go back to academia, but this seemed a more secure replacement. After all it’s one thing to be dependent on the whims of a college president or even a faculty board, but surely there’s safety in subscriber numbers?

Not so fast. As detailed in “Why Has ‘Ivermectin’ Become a Dirty Word?”, Weinstein is on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent casualti

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