At last count, I’ve been sentenced to the Facebook gulag 28 times. The only crime I have ever committed is that of posting articles and memes that reflect my Libertarian beliefs. My posts constantly contradict established progressive orthodoxy, which is the official religion of the political left.
Those on the political left firmly believe that any form of communication that contradicts progressive beliefs is hate speech. They mistakenly maintain that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.
It has been painfully obvious since Facebook first went live that that social media platform is extremely hostile to communications made by those of us on the political right. That is because Mark Zuckerberg is a rabid leftist.
Until recently Facebook would slap articles that contradict progressive orthodoxy with a phony fact check and hide them behind several clicks. After offenders accumulate a couple of these bogus fact checks, they were sent to the gulag for 90 days. During that time hardly anyone sees your posts because they are reduced to the lowest possible priority.
Just this past month Facebook began removing posts entirely. When they do a scary looking message like this one, which I received today, flashes across your screen
As you can see from the title of the actual article they removed, it is in no way spam: Texas Mom Reads Anal Sex Passage From School Book — Mic Gets Cut (taphaps.com). Imagine a book distributed in school that is so pornographic the reading it at a schoolboard meeting gets your mic cut off and posts mentioning it removed from Facebook.
After the screen informing you that they removed your post Facebook warns you that you will be in trouble if you continue posting stuff that they do not like. It is a blatant form of intimidation.
The most pathetic and most dangerous aspect of this censorship nonsense is this screen equating sharing articles that contradict progressive orthodoxy with physical harm.
Artificial Intelligence, AI for short, is dangerous.
Musical instruments can be used to create beautiful and soul-stirring music, such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony; they can also be abused to grind out aural rubbish such as Screaming Lord Sutch’s Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, which a BBC poll found to be the worst album of all time.
Artificial intelligence can be twisted to produce ugliness, distortions, and lies.
On my smartphone, I asked Meta AI, thru Facebook, “Is Biden healthy?”
This is the answer I received:
President Joe Biden has generally been considered healthy for his age. In 2021, his physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, released a medical report stating that Biden was “healthy” and “vigorous” and that he was fit to serve as president.
However, like many people his age, Biden has had some health issues, including:
– A history of brain aneurysms (Successfully treated in 1988). – A pulmonary embolism (treated in 1988). – Atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat). – High cholesterol. – Acid reflux. – A minor foot fracture in 2020. – COVID-19 in 2022 (mild symptoms).
Despite these issues, Biden has maintained an active schedule and has been cleared by his doctors to continue serving as president.
While I am not a doctor, but clearly the president is that the president is “an old 81” and at the very least, should submit to a full cognitive exam from a qualified and unbiased team of psychiatrists.
Meta AI doesn’t mention Biden’s frequent mental wanderings, the most recent of which was last month’s disastrous Biden press conference that was abruptly ended by Karine Jean-Pierre.
Let’s check into Meta AI’s opinion on the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump.
“Is Trump healthy?”
Former President Donald Trump’s health has been a subject of interest and controversy. In 2019, his then-personal physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, wrote a letter stating that Trump was in “excellent physical health” and that his lab results were “astonishingly excellent.” However, there have been some concerns and controversies surrounding Trump’s health, including:
– Obesity (he is reportedly 6’3″ and weighed 230 pounds in 2019). – High cholesterol. – A history of fast food consumption and poor diet. – Questions about his mental health and cognitive abilities. . – A bout of COVID-19 in 2020 (he was hospitalized for a few days). – A history of esophageal reflux and sleep apnea.
It’s important to note that Trump’s health records have not been fully disclosed, and some of his medical information has been disputed or controversial.
Shameful.
As the Washington Post says, “Democracy dies in darkness.” It can also choke to death from lies.
Yes, Trump’s diet sucks and he’s overweight. Yet one Meta AI distortion about Trump jumps out: “Questions about his mental health and cognitive abilities.” Trump’s political rallies are an exercise of streams of consciousness. No one ever questioned James Joyce’s cognitive abilities. The same goes for legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel. Trump’s mind is as sharp as a pin, while Biden can’t even make it through a brief speech in front of a teleprompter.
“Controversy” and “controversial” are used in Meta AI’s account of Trump’s health, but not in Biden’s health rundown.
I could go on and on, but two more things: I’ve always been skeptical about the established line that Biden’s “minor foot fracture” was the result of the then-president-elect playing with his dog. And while Meta AI while mentions that Trump suffers from sleep apnea, it’s been widely reported–but not by Meta AI–that Biden uses a CPAP machine to treat his sleep apnea.
If America ever collapses, an Edward Gibbon of the future will need to include a chapter or two about social media in that account of the decline and fall.
I played around the Meta AI a bit more, not every answer about Trump’s health was a biased as the one documented here, but perhaps Meta AI was getting wise to me.
I’m sure Meta AI has a file on me that includes the words “right-wing lunatic.”
John Ruberry regularly blogs, without the use of AI, at Marathon Pundit.
Just yesterday I got hit with another of those fraudulent fact checks that Facebook loves to hurl around whenever a conservative or libertarian posts the actual truth. I generally rack up several a week, which then earnes me more lengthy stays in Facebook jail. Like all of their phony fact checks, this one included an article by a supposedly independent news organization. In this case, the article was from the uber progressive PolitiFact.
A Facebook post says the Great Reset advocates replacing capitalism with an economic system that is “kind of socialism, kind of communism” but “mostly just fascism.”
The World Economic Forum never advocated for the creation of a totalitarian world government or the replacement of capitalism with another economic system. There is no evidence to support this theory, and it has been thoroughly debunked.
To debunk Facebook’s sham fact check, I went straight to the Great Reset page on the World Economic Forum website.
To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.
That paragraph rather ominously sounds like the WEF is working hard transform the world into a Socialist economy.
The World Economic Forum most definitely embraces the philosophy of Rahm Emanuel who said:
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
Here is the WEF’s justification for the Great Reset.
All of this will exacerbate the climate and social crises that were already underway. Some countries have already used the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse to weaken environmental protections and enforcement. And frustrations over social ills like rising inequality – US billionaires’ combined wealth has increased during the crisis – are intensifying.
Left unaddressed, these crises, together with COVID-19, will deepen and leave the world even less sustainable, less equal, and more fragile. Incremental measures and ad hoc fixes will not suffice to prevent this scenario. We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems.
The level of cooperation and ambition this implies is unprecedented. But it is not some impossible dream. In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.
As far as the totalitarian part, check out these paragraphs:
Clearly, the will to build a better society does exist. We must use it to secure the Great Reset that we so badly need. That will require stronger and more effective governments, though this does not imply an ideological push for bigger ones. And it will demand private-sector engagement every step of the way.
Moreover, governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes. Depending on the country, these may include changes to wealth taxes, the withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies, and new rules governing intellectual property, trade, and competition.
The only way a government can implement equitable outcomes is through a totalitarian government. Wealth must be forcibly seized from one group and given to another. The WEF also seeks to implement the Green New Deal on a global scale.
The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability. Here, the large-scale spending programs that many governments are implementing represent a major opportunity for progress. The European Commission, for one, has unveiled plans for a €750 billion ($826 billion) recovery fund. The US, China, and Japan also have ambitious economic-stimulus plans.
Rather than using these funds, as well as investments from private entities and pension funds, to fill cracks in the old system, we should use them to create a new one that is more resilient, equitable, and sustainable in the long run. This means, for example, building “green” urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.
Like all Leftist economic schemes, the Great Reset will rely heavily on socialism and totalitarianism.
Cerberus and Heracles. Etching by Antonio Tempesta (Italy, Florence, 1555–1630). The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Graphic courtesy of Wikipedia.
By John Ruberry
A theme coming out of Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files is that there is a three headed beast that seeks to be an overlord of us all, who I am dubbing Cerberus.
Why that name? According to Greek mythology, he was a vicious three-headed dog who guarded the underworld, the realm of the dead. Sometimes he was called the Hound of Hades. “Heads of snakes grew from his back, and he had a serpent’s tail,” Encyclopedia Brittanica tells us about Cerberus. If you are thinking of the hosts of The View now, then we are kindred spirits.
There is a nexus between the federal government, most ominously the FBI, the mainstream media, and Big Tech. Information is of course power, and the Modern Cerberus used that power to suppress and censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as dissenting opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic. And probably many more topics.
In regard to second one, I regularly see CDC public service TV ads that tells us that COVID is a serious health threat if you suffer from other ailments, not so much everyone else. Earlier this year, self-appointed COVID expert Bill Gates said of the virus, “We didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly in the elderly, kind of like flu is, although a bit different than that.” Expressing such opinions on Twitter of Facebook would lead those social media giants to suspend or ban users from their platforms in 2020 and 2021.
The mythological Cerberus would devour and dead souls who tried to escape Hades. Let me rephrase it for our troubled times: the beast permanently banned them with no hope of appeal.
Moving from a prominent top federal government job to the media, and sometimes back again, is an old phenomenon, but it has accelerated lately–cable news is the culprit, and most of the participants in this transfer portal are Democrats. Jen Psaki comes to mind, as she has gone from working in the Barack Obama White House, to being a CNN contributor, then back to government as the White House press secretary under Joe Biden, then back to the media as an MSNBC contributor.
As for Big Tech, Andy Stone, the communications director at Meta, the parent of Facebook, declared on Twitter in 2020 that FB, in regard to New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, would be “reducing its distribution on our platform” until it was fact-checked. I call that suppression. Prior to joining Meta, Stone was a longtime congressional staffer, working exclusively for Democrats.
While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
Last week Musk fired Twitter’s deputy general counsel, Jim Baker, who may have withheld damaging details involving the FBI and its alleged role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop reports. Baker, when he was an FBI attorney, played a part in the Donald Trump-Russiagate collusion red herring. Before he joined, Twitter, Baker was a CNN analyst.
Stifling the free flow of information is the stuff of totalitarian states. My wife was raised in the Soviet Union, she emigrated to the USA in 1991. An extreme example yes, but I was the one who told her that not only did the United States send men to the moon and safely return them to Earth–but did so six times.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 