Saturday, September 6, 2014

Beware: Facebook's "Soft Censorship"

September 5, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - The Land Destroyer Report maintained a Facebook page under the name Anthony Cartalucci. Since 2009 it was used to express my personal thoughts regarding the news of the day, as well as share relevant links with followers. Today, Facebook, without warning or opportunity to appeal, decided that the Facebook account must be changed over to a "page." By doing so, all those following my account no longer would receive updates, because of Facebook's "news feed" filters.

The premise behind news feed filters is that people have too many "friends" and are following too many accounts, so they can't possibly manage all the content themselves. Therefore, Facebook will do it for them. We already know about the Facebook "experiment" where they intentionally manipulated the news feed of hundreds of thousands of Facebook users without their consent.

A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks," stated in its abstract that:
We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.Not only are the findings troubling - illustrating that Facebook possesses the ability to influence the emotions of its users unwittingly through careful manipulation of their news feeds - but the invasive, unethical methods by which Facebook conducted the experiment are troubling as well.
Clearly manipulating users' news feeds possesses powerful propaganda and mass-manipulative influence - surely influence those with the resources would be willing to pay for. And that is exactly what Facebook has arranged for with their new "reach" system. Facebook's own explanation is as follows:

2 comments:

  1. Censorship from the owners of censorship! Not that we're in baited breath for the moment of snap goes the weasel that already popped!

    ReplyDelete
  2. We're NOT in baited breath for the moment of snap goes the weasel that already popped! Censorship from the owners of censorship!

    ReplyDelete