Facebook tells PragerU they are sorry for censoring their videos, suppressing others
Big tech continues to be called out for their filters and outright censorship of speech they don’t approve of and PragerU is just the latest victim.
We mistakenly removed these videos and have restored them because they don’t break our standards. This will reverse any reduction in content distribution you’ve experienced. We’re very sorry and are continuing to look into what happened with your Page.
Yep, sorry about that. This was their response(s):
Does anyone really believe this was simply a mistake?
Removing two videos, marking them as “hate speech” and then subsequently censoring over 15 of our following posts to reach 0 of our 3 million followers is not a mistake. It’s deliberate censorship of conservative ideas.
Yes, two full videos were removed and over a dozen were surppressed.
PragerU has three million Facebook followers and more than 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, many of whom are under 35.
One of the blocked videos was titled Where Are the Moderate Muslims? It contained the claim that “at this time in history, the Muslim world is dominated by bad ideas and bad beliefs”.
The other was titled Make Men Masculine Again. It suggested that males should harness aggressive and violent urges rather than trying to eliminate them.
Our last 9 posts have been completely censored reaching 0 of our 3 million followers,” PragerU’s Will Witt said in a statement. “At least two of our video posts were deleted last night for ‘hate speech’ including a post of our recent video with The Conservative Millennial, Make Men Masculine Again.”
Among the clips that remained online but were not promoted were a video defending Israel’s right to exist and an upload accusing Hollywood of being the world’s largest left-wing propaganda machine.
After Prager University challenged the decision, Facebook backtracked.
“The videos in question were mistakenly removed,” a spokeswoman told the BBC,
“While we continue to research what caused this error, we have restored the content because it does not break our community standards and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
“Facebook is caught between a rock and a hard place,” commented Alice Enders from the market research firm Enders Analysis.
“It is simultaneously exhorted to ‘do something’ – employing human monitors or tweaking the algorithm – to identify take downs, and then vilified by those whose freedom of expression is ostensibly prevented.”
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