Facebook shares have dropped a staggering
$56 billion after major companies including Unilever and Coca-Cola
pulled their advertisements from the social media giant, despite CEO
Mark Zuckerberg promising action on hate speech and putting a warning
label on a Republican National Committee (RNC) video.
Shares
in the platform went crashing 8.3 percent to $216.08 by the closing
bell Friday - its lowest in three months - after more than 100
advertisers boycotted the firm for its failure to stop hate speech and
misinformation being posted on its platform.
This
wiped $56 billion off Facebook’s market value and dealt a hefty $7.2
billion blow to Zuckerberg's personal fortune, pushing him down from
third to fourth place on Bloomberg Billionaires Index and leaving him
with a new net worth of $82.3 billion.
Facebook censors almost 90 percent of ‘hate speech’ before it’s
allowed to circulate, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress at Wednesday’s
Big Tech hearing, responding to pressure from Democrats to submit to the
advertiser boycott.
“We’re able to
proactively identify 89 percent of the hate speech that we take down
before, I think, it’s even seen by other people,” Zuckerberg told the Antitrust Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives on Wednesday.
The statement was in response to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) pressuring Facebook to “join the civil rights movement” by submitting to the demands of the Stop Hate For Profit campaign, an advertising boycott accusing Facebook of tolerating “widespread hate” on the platform.
With
about 1 billion health searches happening on Google every day, it's not
hard to understand why censoring natural health information serves a
multitude of interests, not the least of which is Big Pharma's bottom
line.
A new analysis released
by Bob Troia, Twitter handle Quantified Bob, reveals how health sites
have been decimated by Google in the period tracked from April 15th,
2018 to August 15th, 2019.
He posted the following
graphic on Twitter on August 25th, 2019, showing as high as a 99.87%
decrease in visibility through Google search results, and a 81.14% drop
for Greenmedinfo.com.
Mayo Clinic and WebMD, on the other hand, saw a 59.98% and 30.71%
increase, respectively. The difference in treatment between natural and
conventional health websites has lead many to speculate that this was a
manually executed penalty targeting the alternative medicine space. One
of our colleagues, a Google SEO expert, posted his opinion on the matter
here: “Google Takes Position in Controversial Vaccine Safety Debate.”
Be forewarned, the rabbit hole goes deep. Google’s motivations and bias
stretch all the way to election manipulation, as we discuss here: "Google Just Scrubbed Natural Health Websites From Its Search Results; Whistleblower Explains How and Why."
However, you don’t have to fall into the stereotypes of a health freedom
advocate, vaccine choice, or natural health obsessed organization to
feel the pain of Google’s purge. Examine.com, for instance, which prides
itself on being entirely science-based, and who has written about how
“you do not need to worry about MSG,” “Curcumin is not a panacea,” and
“Diet soda is unlikely to hurt your health,” also got hit hard. The
founder recently wrote an article to answer the question: “Why has Examine.com disappeared from search results?”
He and his organization played by Google’s rules, yet have all but
disappeared from the search results. The same happened to Joe Cohen,
founder of Self-Hacked, who wrote an excellent article on the subject
here: “Google Is Taking Censorship of Health Websites to The Next Level.”
Guilherme Schneider One of the tools being tested will enable users to inform Facebook if
certain news stories are using “misleading language”. Some users posted
images of a Facebook survey asking them the following question: “To
what extent do you think that this link’s title withholds key details of
the story?”.
It is still unclear what kind of actions will be carried out after
this additional user data is collected, but it is likely that some sort
of a database, containing the list of “misleading” news websites, will
be generated.
In a not so distant past, content curators from Facebook confirmed
that they received direct orders from the company to decrease the
relevance or even hide from the newsfeed stories and content with
conservative language. While this happened in the US, similar stories
have been reported in Brazil, the United Kingdom around the time of the
Brexit, and in other countries.
Recently, there were other reports that Facebook developed
a special software for the Chinese market, that would enable “third
parties” to authorize the contents before posting it to the users’
timelines. The initiative would aim to lift the current ban of the
social network in the country.
The main difference between this new software and the current content
restrictions in some countries is that instead of reacting to a
government request to hide some specific content, Facebook would be
giving the option to some parties to censor and take down content before
it is even posted on the network.
It is true that when you create a profile on Facebook or any other
social network, you have to accept their terms and conditions in
exchange of the “non-paid” use of their platforms. Most of these terms
and conditions allow the social networks to analyze the information you
are publishing and reading for several proposes, including targeted
advertisements and many others, but is it ethical to take advantage of
this information in order to define what content you should or should
not see?
Since Snowden’s NSA information leak we know that we can be monitored
at any given time by government agencies. The realization of this fact,
however, didn’t stop us from using the same networks, nor did it prompt
the closure of the NSA or other agencies involved in the perpetual
recording and storage of our data.
But now we are entering a whole new level in which companies and
governments will attempt to define what is right and wrong for us to
see, read and talk about. What’s even more bizarre is that the CEO of
Facebook could potentially run for office,
while retaining control over one of the most popular social networks in
the world, with the capability of retrieving and accessing anyone’s
data without any sort of legal process or request.
This Orwellian trend is truly scary and we should really start
questioning ourselves about the extent to which we are willing to
continue handing out personal data and information to these networks. The Duran
