1w ago

Meta Censors #Democrat when searched for

The Censorship has begun

220 comments

This is not mildly infuriating. Its incredibly worrying.
- someone should make c/incrediblyworrying

Running Shortlist includes blocking hashtags for:
democrat (but not republican)
voteblue (but not votered)
presidentbiden (but not president harris)
kamala
liberal
liberals
leftist
leftists
barackobama (but not presidentobama)
obama (but not obamas)
berniesanders
votebiden (votekamala, votetrump works tho)
democracy (WOW)
presidentcarter
fuckputin
makeamericasmartagain
libertarian (for some reason)
igcensorship
factsoverfiction
fuckdemocrats
fuckrepublicans
bluewave (redwave still works, shocker)
politicalleft (blocked, but politicalright isn't)
fascism
fascist
antifascism
prochoice
- From Germany: about half of these still work for me. But only half.
  
  Some have started working for me again, #democrat works again, but not #prochoice #kamala or #fuckputin
  
  Me too, I tried just a few. On pc #antifascist , #fascist and #democracy didn't work. On a mobile phone from my colleague #democracy worked though.
- Well fuck.
  presidentbiden (but not president harris)
  barackobama (but not presidentobama)
  votebiden (votekamala, votetrump works tho)
  presidentcarter
  libertarian (for some reason)
  These are some odd censorship choices. In America, libertarian is short for (not really anarcho) anarcho-capitalist and they tend to vote right wing. They’re the tea party essentially and trumps election is a culmination of the tea party’s power. I consider myself a left libertarian / anarcho-communist but we are not that common in America. Unfortunately.
  And why censor Carter? He’s dead. And why biden but not Harris? So odd.
- igcensorship
  This one's funny. I wonder if they'll go recursive and add "igcensorshipcensorship" next.
- What app are you searching for hashtags in? Is that facebook?
  
  This is my instagram, I deleted facebook

Time in USA: 1935, Germany
- Don't share this. The stylization is too cool to allow the assholes to see it and use it.
- Maybe we are witnessing a modern day version of the Business Plot.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

I dont even know how to react to this. It feels like my reaction to everything has been holy shit this is fucking insane. I'm burnt out, I just need to tend to my own garden. I cant have sympathy for people who support the right and these stupid social media platforms.
- I have that same thought, but then I think this is exactly how all the non-Jewish people felt as hitler was rising to power. I end up getting even more angry and looking up where to buy fertilizer.
  
  Love the double entendre. Are you tending your garden harder, or blowing up Parliament?
- That's kind of the point. A constant barrage of stupid and dangerous shit to keep you enraged until you burn put. You cannot stay enraged for four years and nobody will care to do anything if it's a constant stream of small and big steps to fascism. They're not removing all liberties at once, but in a lot of steps so that it becomes impossible to agree on which step becomes the straw to break the camel's back.
- Protip: Disconnect yourself from the online media circus.
  Bring yourself up to speed with current developments once a week.
  And focus your energy on helping people around you who need help.
  You can't stop fascism all by yourself. But you can affect your immediate surroundings.
  And if enough people do that, there will be resistance everywhere.

I thought they were gonna promote more political content
- Yeah but only the right political conten
  (The choice of definition for the word right is left to the reader)

Meta says its working urgently to fix a problem with Instagram which results in a "results hidden" message when users search for the terms "Democrat" or "Democrats".
If that's hard to fix, I recommend shutting down the servers forever.
- Makes me wonder if it was something like a lot of people were scrolling those hashtags and leaving hate comments and it triggered some automated hide feature and now they're trying to find some middle ground. That's being very generous to Meta though.
  
  I hope you’re right but something tells me this was intentional
- It's hard emotionally

German news magazine Der Spiegel wrote they had talked to a Meta representative and they said "This is definitely an error and we will fix it fast"
My personal take: An incident like this illustrates how vulnerable we are to being censored and silenced when using social media and communication channels owned by billionaires. It's time not only to leave those platforms but to educate your friends and family why this is absolutely necessary. No more excuses.
Original: Update, 13.30 Uhr: Auf SPIEGEL-Anfrage hat sich Meta inzwischen kurz und knapp zu dem Phänomen geäußert. »Dies ist eindeutig ein Fehler, den wir schnell beheben werden«, so eine Sprecherin des Konzerns.
- I know as a software engineer I frequently accidentally release bugs that block entire political parties after their opponents take power. It's one of those things most people forget to write unit tests for.
  
  Could've happened to anybody, really.
  
  Yes, and automatically follow JD Vance and Trump. Totally a bug /s
  
  No no, the bug is it told you it hid results instead of just secretly hiding them. Hiding them was the intended behavior.
- At the moment a search for #democrat on my facebook page returns a bunch of posts saying that searches for #democrat are blocked and a bunch (more recent ones) saying it isn't.
  I was skeptical that this was an outrage campaign but with a real news source having a quote verifying the behavior from the company (the above referenced article was on the Der Spiegel front page and the update is at the bottom.) I'm less skeptical.
  Pushing through a change doesn't happen by accidentally clicking on a button. Where I work it's a multistep process requiring manager approval. Even if the block happened by mistake it still means there was a mechanism in place to make it happen, configured so that it only censored left leaning hashtags. This is "not good."
  
  I wouldn't be surprised if it was an AI or other automated system blocking it, because an outright block instead of a shadow ban seems unlikely to have been done by human hands. But that just indicates that there are systemic issues or biases that clearly favor one party over the other, and that's not much better.
- They will now shadow ban these topics, so people can catch them red handed. But users will just never see it in their feed
  
  Yeah, that was my thought too. What a dumb way to censor by search input instead of censoring the output.
  It probably went like this at Meta:
  Product Manager: Hey we just got this word filter list from HQ to be implemented ASAP.
  Devs: Sure thing boss.
- they said "This is definitely an error and we will fix it fast"
  I'm pretty sure that's literally what they always say.
  Like, has a mainstream brainwashing platform ever admitted to making the change and owning up to it? As far as I can remember, these features keep accidentally getting thought up, coded and released into the production product.
  I'm at the point where there is no benefit of the doubt, especially with malicious actors like Twitter and Facebook. If there isn't proof they didn't intend to release it (and you can't exactly prove a negative), it was on purpose.
- This has happened dozens of times, each time it was an "error". Press X to doubt.

Looks like Zuckerberg needs a "red shell"..
- I vote for the blue shell, it never misses

I'm not sure how many years of headlines you all need before you just stop using these services. You already know they artificially lower your engagement, so you're just literally wasting your time at this point. (If you're not a fascist, that is.)
- Preaching to the choir here

"Fact checkers are politically sided"

Benito Mussolini is often attributed with the quote: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
No one can argue the US isn't corporatist.

Is this true? Can anyone confirm this?
- Confirmed in instagram in the EU.
- I just confirmed it in the US. #republican returns plenty of results.
  
  Strangely, this is also the case in Australia.
- Yes, I confirmed. I live in Germany and hashtags like democrat or berniesanders are blocked and hashtags like Republican and donaldjtrump are not blocked.
  I was only on Instagram for my friends to exchange reels and post life updates like once a year but this crosses another line. Migrating from all these monopolies is such a tax on my time but this is a small way to hurt these big giants.
  I recommend everyone do the same when they have the time. I'd like to learn about RSS feeds and go back to a bunch of individual blogs for friends and family. Decentralized power is I guess the most important characteristic to look for these days. Fuck, this correction period is going to suck.
- Confirmed
  
  Not confirmed by me. Just searched this in instagram.
- Happens if you search #berniesanders too but mot #donaldtrump
- Also happening on TikTok now after the “ban”.
- Just tested in in the EU with a friend's Instagram account. It's real.
- You can google it, it's like that for many people.
  I can search #domocrat again, but not #fuckputin or #prochoice etc.
  You can also test for yourself, this screenshot was from my instagram search

Don't worry! Free Speech Republicans AGAINST Censorship will be FURIOUS when they hear about this!

What's a two party state that's one party down?
- Sounds a bit like a...dictatorship
- Simple democracy.
  
  So basic you can hardly tell it's there!

Australia checking in.....yeah nah it's happening here too. Shitcunts.

The USA becoming a one-party nation in real time

What was that story warning people that if they use RedNote they'll experience 'Chinese style censorship' for the first time?
US using the old if you can't beat em approach
- Yeah the US is making China look tame... Fucked up world we live in... Definitely the wrong timeline...

WTF
- It’s not real. I can search the hashtag “democrat” and get results just like any other hashtag.
  
  You don’t need to repeatedly post the same screenshot for people, damn. Chill

- Same results later that day. They were running a test.

The Product Manager made the mistake of having the keyword be overtly banned by the SWEs.
What was intended was an algorithmic change to hide the content entirely and divert to "acceptable" topics while obfuscating the ban.
It will be corrected shortly.

Maybe this will hopefully get people to stop using the garbage platform that enabled Trump and aided a literal genocide because they didn't hire anyone fluent in the language of the people being exterminated.
I can't wait for the day Zuckerberg loses all his money and dies alone because he alienated himself from anyone who cared about him.
- With pixelfed ripping right now and available tools to migrate your IG images, there’s never been a better time to leave zuck’s shithole sites.

Blocking hashtags while pretending to be more free speech.
I hope meta goes down in flames

So Zuck has declared the Democratic Party an unlawful extremist organisation before the government could do so?

Just tried it. It works fine. Granted, most results are from fascist accounts, but it does work
- I wonder if that may be the cause of the block in the original post — i.e. if the fascist accounts were posting lots of "sensitive" content (such as stuff that would, in a different era, been far more likely to be removed if reported), then it might appear like the censorship that OP saw. I vaguely recall an instance of something similar happening, and if so, the "censorship" would be an automated error, and it being visible now would be after the manual intervention.
  
  Occam's razor disproves this to me.
  It's more likely that meta was testing censorship, but people caught on.
  Than #johnOliver #bernieSanders #Democrat #proChoice etc. All being banned, but none of the conserve hashtags

Confirming this was the last straw and the moment I uninstalled all meta apps

Every day is a day closer to the electorate realizing certain luxuries have been removed from their cages. Here's hoping it's sooner rather than later. And don't be pathetic and turn to the democrats to help you. They were bought and paid for and will be lucky not to be disappeared.
- Luigi, that you?
  
  Ugh, excuse me, I'm a "dirty lib" and you can check my credentials on that one.
  In reality, though, I've been saying since Novemeber we are on a fixed rail now and if there was once a way off it just passed us by. The sooner everyone comes to realize it the better but I can't make everyone do it. So just spreading the word and hopefully they know I'm not trying to scare them but prepare them for the not so distant future.
  And if I go with the first round of cullings I'm happy too because the horrors about to be witnessed will break any good person and my heart is weak.

Just testing the new Great American Firewall!

Is this pre active censorship on the term “Democrat”. Or are posts using the term getting flagged for other terms. I can imagine there is an increasing amount of hate speech circling there. Both scenarios are worrying in different ways.
- #proChoice and #kamala are also censored
  
  I am very glad to no longer be on there but shits gonna spread to the rest of the web quickly i fear.

Zuckerburg is furious that dems dragged him before congress and tried to blame Trump winning on Facebook.

Scary if true, but I'm in the US and everything seems to be working for me. It could have been a temporary bug that was already fixed? Not sure
- Sadly it's true.
  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g32yxpdz0o

Seems to work on my FB account in the US. It seems to be posts complaining about it though but still pulling up popular searches of the term.
I deleted my Instagram accounts so I can't check there.

Move fast and censor things

And so it begins, this might be the start of the digital war. Let's hope they won't make it into a physical one.

Nah. I'll die on that particular hill.

I wonder if this is Trump doing censorship or China doing censorship making it look like Trump doing censorship.
- Must be China Trump and his Oligarchs can't do anything wrong they're protecting our freedom /s

For another data point I can search any of those terms on the shortlist that was posted just fine, using Facebook on the website. Either searching for posts or videos. May be app specific or something that was very temporary? Located in US. No Instagram account.
- It sounds like it only affected Instagram
  https://techissuestoday.com/meta-auto-follow-trump-vance-blocks-democrat-hashtags/

Maybe it's just a bug.

Maybe it is being abused by trolls and such so badly they had to disable it temporarily.

It's not censorship. It's a private company that is regulating the content on its platform. Nothing is stopping you from using a different one or creating your own
- As long as you don't mind the fact that everyone else is on this particular one.
  The network effect is a real thing, it's not that simple.
- This is such a dumb thing to say, you could also say that all news papers etc. Are private companies.
  But if they're collectively controlled by a few people or the government, and only publish certain things. That is 100% censorship

I get censored here all the time.

Post is fake.
My results:

Misinformation flows when people don’t check things. Everyone should check this for themselves then decide how much to trust OP in the future.
- Other users in the thread confirmed this at the time of posting, so I presume they (at least partially) reverted the changes after they were caught.
- There were multiple people confirming it. Meta can change things on their end at a moments notice. If you read the rest of the thread you'd see that the term you searched for is working again, but there are others that still aren't.
- Instagram back pedaled, I can also search it now.
  There are many news articles about it, most if not everyone was experiencing it.
  fuckputin is still blocked for me
- Dude... How many times are you going to post this same thing lol
  
  Will continue to post as long as komrade orders him too, and gives him some rubles. Or maybe stolichnaya.

Welcome to what yall did to republicans for 4 years
- We did? Can you point to an example?
  
  I didn’t take screenshots and bitch on here
- I like even in your defense of the behavior, you admit it's evil, you just use a lie to justify it.
  
  It’s not a lie lol
- People like you are so stupid it's not even funny.
- As an American, most of us want you to leave.
  
  Yeah I bet. I’ll just go ahead and live in one of the many red counties lol
- What? Listen to you spout lies and hate from all the rooftops you could climb to? Go back to sleep troll.
- Bull fucking shit.
- Surely there is ton of evidence of your claim other than your incredebly large asshole filled with DNA samples of the people in office currently.
- so the "we" in ya'll are the owners of Meta, and the "what we did" was block the search term #republicans, which never happened, do I have that right in terms of understanding what you meant by this?
- Maybe try to be better. You know, when they go low, we go high

220 comments