The Censorship has begun
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Maybe it is being abused by trolls and such so badly they had to disable it temporarily.
Blocking hashtags while pretending to be more free speech.
I hope meta goes down in flames
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.
It’s hard emotionally
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
I’m sure it happened just after Trump took office with explicit technocratic goals ENTIRELY on accident.
*technofascist
All I can think about is how Israel’s AI targeting program (lavender) is coming to a leftist near you. Combine with ukraines AI drones and we have a technofascist future where dissent gets removed permanently. Instead of banning your account they’ll be banning your life.
They’ve always been the same thing. If you took the concept of a technocracy at its most idealized form it’s still innately undemocratic.
It might, possibly, work, but it’s still authoritarian in nature.
But technofascist does strip their veneer of being actual engineers away I suppose, so it definitely has benefits.
To the uninitiated technocrat sounds like techno democrat - techno democracy. It doesn’t sound that bad. Technofascist doesn’t have the same muddiness - it’s clear what they are.
The USA becoming a one-party nation in real time
Looks like Zuckerberg needs a “red shell”…
I vote for the blue shell, it never misses
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.
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.
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.
That’s the mistake: putting it in the open ban list instead of the shadow ban list.
Dev acting in #resistance or dev making an honest mistake? I suppose we’ll never know.
hopefully resistance.
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.
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.
Yes, and automatically follow JD Vance and Trump. Totally a bug /s
Could’ve happened to anybody, really.
Silly Copilot. My bad folks, it’s this crazy AI.
No no, the bug is it told you it hid results instead of just secretly hiding them. Hiding them was the intended behavior.
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.
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
igcensorship
This one’s funny. I wonder if they’ll go recursive and add “igcensorshipcensorship” next.
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.
What app are you searching for hashtags in? Is that facebook?
This is my instagram, I deleted facebook
This is what comes up in my instagram for the same search.
Can you post the entire screenshot? How do we know you didn’t just photoshop that?
Why would this work for me but not for you? Do you think you specifically are being targeted with results blocking? How do you account for this?
I don’t see how the entire screenshot would be any harder to photoshop. But you can look through this thread and find multiple different people confirming it of their ends too.
I see you’ve already seen that one, but the point is multiple people are having different results. Unless you think like 10 different people are independently lying about it.
There are articles about it
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1i6h5h2/instagram_has_begun_censoring_hashtags_related_to/
A Reddit post is not an article.
The Reddit post directly links to an article. It’s not in English though.
There are articles about Bigfoot
10 people is hard to coordinate, but I’ve only seen two people: OP and one other account (probably the one you linked to).
I think more readers need to try this themselves. Go to the Instagram app, search
#Democrator#democrat, and post the screenshot here.Works for me still. I wonder if they’re staggering things
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.
Time in USA: 1935, Germany
Don’t share this. The stylization is too cool to allow the assholes to see it and use it.
Nah, I’d rather push them into embracing actual, full on nazi symbology. Believe it or not, the majority of the American public do not see republicans as nazis. The sooner they look like it, the sooner the last plausible deniability falls, and the sooner the “cheaper eggs,” “voted for the economy” idiots have to face the realities of their decisions.
Maybe we are witnessing a modern day version of the Business Plot.
I get censored here all the time.
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.
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
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)
