Olives @olives@qoto.org

"Two individuals wrote that they were reported for posting about the return of graphic novelist Alison Bechdel’s celebrated Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip. One happened to be Holly Hughes, who is no stranger to censorship: She’s a performance artist and member of the infamous NEA Four. A gay man posted that he was banned for seven days after sharing a vintage flyer for the 1970s lesbian magazine DYKE, which was recently featured in an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York."

https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-hate-speech-policies-censor-marginalized-users/
"As queer artists and activists who have challenged Facebook’s “real names” policy for three years, we’re alarmed by a new trend: Many LGBTQ people’s posts have been blocked recently for using words like “dyke,” “fag,” or “tranny” to describe ourselves and our communities."

"While these words are still too-often shouted as slurs, they’re also frequently “reclaimed” by queer and transgender people as a means of self-expression."

https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/facebook-shouldnt-censor-offensive-speech
"Given the enormous amount of speech uploaded every day to Facebook’s platform, attempting to filter out “bad” speech is a nearly impossible task. The use of algorithms and other artificial intelligence to try to deal with the volume is only likely to exacerbate the problem."

"If Facebook gives itself broader censorship powers, it will inevitably take down important speech and silence already marginalized voices. We’ve seen this before. Last year, when activists of color and white people posted the exact same content, Facebook moderators censored only the activists of color. When Black women posted screenshots and descriptions of racist abuse, Facebook moderators suspended their accounts or deleted their posts. And when people used Facebook as a tool to document their experiences of police violence, Facebook chose to shut down their livestreams. The ACLU’s own Facebook post about censorship of a public statue was also inappropriately censored by Facebook."

http://tribune.com.pk/story/855030/facebook-censored-54-posts-for-blasphemy-in-pakistan-in-second-half-of-2014/
"This, however, was down from the massive 1,773 pieces of content blocked in Pakistan by the social networking site in the first half of 2014 following requests made by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Ministry of Information Technology to block content for blasphemy and criticism of the state."

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/vienna-museums-turn-to-onlyfans-to-avoid-censorship
"A group of museums in Vienna have banded together to create an OnlyFans account where, for $5 per month, subscribers can view works of fine art including the aforementioned sculpture (a nude female figure made of limestone and dating back to circa 25,000 BCE), paintings by the expressionists Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl, work by graphic artist Koloman Moser, the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, and more."

"The initiative is a response to guidelines on other, more mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, that keep the museums from sharing images with nudity there."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39326509/naked-mannequin-photographer-banned-from-facebook
"A Canadian photographer has been banned from Facebook after criticism over her photos of naked women posing behind a mannequin."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/19/facebook-meta-vietnam-government-censorship/
"The company is not unique in removing sensitive content in Vietnam. Since 2019, Google, which owns YouTube, has received more than 2,000 government requests to take down content in Vietnam and has complied with the vast majority of them, according to company data. TikTok says it removed or restricted more than 300 posts in the country last year for violating local law."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/19/facebook-meta-vietnam-government-censorship/
"Since then, the social media giant Meta, which owns Facebook, has been making repeated concessions to Vietnam’s authoritarian government, routinely censoring dissent and allowing those seen as threats by the government to be forced off the platform"

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/07/02/facebook-has-been-bending-to-the-will-of-arab-despots
"He suspects Facebook silenced him for commemorating a Syrian football star who, after months of protesting, picked up arms and was killed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censorship_in_China In China, it is the very excuse which is used for censorship.

As I pointed out the other day, "safety" can be used to *justify anything*. This is how you have "Trust & Safety" folks giving rhetorical cover to authoritarian regimes in Asia.

Facebook was an even bigger joke, readily bending to authoritarians the world over, and eager to build tools of censorship. Be careful about romanticizing these people, perhaps they don't have Musk's personality, however, things still got worse under them.

We have to remember that when companies like Twitter, or Facebook, got pushed around, they would come up with a PR excuse to justify their decisions. Oh, they are concerned about "safety" (a nebulous concept).

Twitter's Former Head of Trust, Safety, and Policy Vijaya Gadde was a joke who was pushed around by authoritarians (including puritans, to some extent).

If Facebook did turn to censoring abortion related speech, I wonder if he would consider that petty speech to not be prioritized?

For things like advocacy to do with Palestine, these might still fall under a terrorism catch-all, and the Harvest Moon case might fall under "drugs".

In the end, there likely would be more expression, however, the changes might not be as broad as one might assume.

I suspect he'll go beyond just a few issues like Covid and gender.

However, there are still justifications which the company might use to keep it's more pernicious forms of censorship intact (i.e. sex workers, nipples). And it might not prevent gaffes like them censoring the word "intersex".

I've heard of one which apparently censored curse words, and one which censored content for being "demonic".

Just because a company suggests they're free speech, it doesn't mean it's meaningful. For instance, there were those free speech sites, like Parler, which bragged about that but which censored things like sex.

We'll see if Zuckerberg lives up to his promises to reduce over-censorship (particularly uniformly).