PROOF: Facebook Patents Shadow Banning Software After Promising Congress It Doesn’t Censor
Tom Pappert
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Facebook was recently granted a patent for shadow banning software they originally asked to patent in 2015, despite publicly promising Congress they do not censor conservatives or Christians.
Only months after publicly promising Congress that it does not shadow ban or otherwise censor conservatives or Christians, Facebook was granted a patent for software that can only be described as shadow banning software. It will allow the big tech company to prevent content from being viewed by the majority of users on the website, while doing nothing to tip off the person posting the content that its reach has been dwarfed.
From the United States patent office:
Users of social networking system are provided with user interface elements permitting the user to post comments on pages within the social networking system. Pages may be provided for any non-user entity, including for example, pages for businesses, products, concepts, etc. Embodiments provided herein permit page moderators to ban certain content from being displayed on a page. For example, the social networking system may receive a list of proscribed content and block comments containing the proscribed content by reducing the distribution of those comments to other viewing users. However, the social networking system may display the blocked content to the commenting user such that the commenting user is not made aware that his or her comment was blocked, thereby providing fewer incentives to the commenting user to spam the page or attempt to circumvent the social networking system filters.
In short, if Facebook wants someone to think they are posting normally, while they are actually posting in a quarantined environment, they now have a patent to do so. This is a phenomenon that has been regularly reported by conservatives, including Big League Politics, which has seen a greatly diminished presence on Facebook after breaking major stories over the last year.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who controls 60 per cent of the company and is essentially immune to criticism from other investors or his board due to his ownership position, told Sen. Ted Cruz that this does not happen last year.
Cruz asked Zuckerberg about the “pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship” that Facebook and other tech companies engage in as a matter of corporate policy.
Cruz continued:
In May of 2016, Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposefully and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about CPAC, including stories about Mitt Romney, including stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, including stories about Glenn Beck. In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the ‘Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day’ page, has blocked a post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently, blocked Trump supporters Diamond and Silk’s page with 1.2 million Facebook followers, after determining their content and brand were, ‘unsafe to the community.’
Zuckerberg replied, saying “we don’t have any bias in the work that we do,” but noted that a lack of political objectivity at the company “is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about.”
President Donald Trump recently promised to act against big tech censorship during the White House Social Media Summit, and cited Rep. Josh Hawley’s recent push to regulate Facebook and other tech companies as an example of possible avenues.
It appears conservatives are doomed to be pushed into the sidelines going into 2020 until the Trump administration is able to act.
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