Search Engines and Social Media Restricting Access to Global Justice, Human Rights, Palestinian and Pro-Afrin Content
Online filters, automated takedowns and algorithms allegedly introduced to stop the spread of terrorist and fake content have led to the removal or blocking of several human rights groups, news organisations, videos, and accounts covering alter-globalisation, environmentalist, anti-war, refugees' rights, Palestinian and pro-Afrin content, according to articles and testimonies from the groups involved.
Yesterday, the page of the website "Insurrection News" was removed from Facebook without explanation. After the website created a new Facebook page, this page was also removed within only a few hours. Insurrection News has been one of the most prominent English-language sources for news related to Turkey's invasion of Afrin, and has also provided essential coverage of police brutality, international protests, and solidarity actions with refugees.
According to the independent news website Gatorna, Facebook has also been involved in the repression of other Kurdish-related and radical content in recent months. On January 24, the Latin American news network TeleSur was removed from Facebook, only to be later restored. TeleSur has covered major global justice and alter-globalisation events ignored by the corporate press and even much of the alternative media, including the 2018 World Social Forum and the WTO protests in Argentina last December.
The website's Twitter posts are also frequently marked as "sensitive content," making them impossible to view without clicking on each post to remove the warning label, a fate shared by many clips of police brutalisations, war crimes, and solidarity actions posted to the accounts of various independent news organisations.
The actions of Facebook, Twitter, Google and other websites to demote or remove content are driven by the requests of Western governments to remove what they see as "terrorist content." The industry, grouped under the umbrella of the "Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism," have used algorithms to detect the "digital fingerprints" of various pieces of "extreme" material, collected on an internet-wide blacklist including over 50,000 videos, texts, and photos. Governments, particularly the UK and Germany, have demanded ever-faster time limits for content to be removed, and many of the algorithms are designed to stop automatic re-uploads.
This corporate flagging system has become integrated with efforts by the police as well as intelligence agencies responsible for brutality and war crimes around the world, including the Mossad and the CIA. The Intercept, a website that has extensively documented torture and human rights abuses by Israel and the US, exposed the fact that the Israeli government has requested that Facebook remove pro-Palestinian posts.
Other Silicon Valley efforts meant to block the spread of "fake news" have also been behind the takedown of contents documenting corporate, environmental, and human rights abuses.
On February 23, just one day after right-wing and Trump supporting accounts were removed as part of an alleged crackdown by Twitter and the German Marshall Fund on "Russian Twitter Bots," 12 accounts opposing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and other trade organisations such as the WTO, were restricted or suspended without explanation. The TTIP and WTO have long been criticised by human rights, environmental, and local campaigners for various reasons, including their promotion of fracking, deregulation, and investor-state-dispute settlement "corporate courts."
A video by the news organisation "Political Analysis" defending refugees, speaking out against NATO wars in Syria, and opposing attempts by the far-right political party "Alternative For Germany" to whip up hatred of immigrants and Muslims, was blocked after fascist groups reported the video to YouTube.
YouTube, owned by Google (Alphabet), has also come under fire from activists and independent journalists for deranking humanitarian, Palestinian and anarchist posts under the guise of combating "conspiracy theories." The Empire Files, a documentary series hosted by journalist Abby Martin that has featured interviews with Ahed Tamimi and has exposed Israeli human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories as well as corporate pollution in Ecuador, is being repressed by the search algorithm, making the videos appear only several pages in even if searched for directly by name.
Similar filters on Google's flagship search engine have also hidden articles and reports by the human rights organisation Amnesty International, which has recently called for the release of Ahed as well as an end to the "Fortress Europe" policy of Turkey and the EU which has led to the deaths of thousands of refugees fleeing war in Syria and slave markets in Libya.
Unfortunately, the corporations involved seem satisfied with the fact that their algorithms and employees are removing anti-corporate, global justice, and anti-war material. In fact, Facebook in recent days before the removal of the Insurrection News accounts called for an intensification of the process.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that the company is planning "drastic measures" to remove content based on its source. It also has called for the promotion of information based around a "tight geographical area" near the user, thus implicitly demoting international solidarity, global justice, human rights and multilingual anarchist accounts.
Meanwhile, Twitter has gone on a spree of takedowns of Afrin and YPG-related posts, including a video by the YPG official account that was deleted just hours after its upload.
The actions of Facebook, Twitter, Google and other websites to demote or remove content are driven by the requests of Western governments to remove what they see as "terrorist content." The industry, grouped under the umbrella of the "Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism," have used algorithms to detect the "digital fingerprints" of various pieces of "extreme" material, collected on an internet-wide blacklist including over 50,000 videos, texts, and photos. Governments, particularly the UK and Germany, have demanded ever-faster time limits for content to be removed, and many of the algorithms are designed to stop automatic re-uploads.
Other Silicon Valley efforts meant to block the spread of "fake news" have also been behind the takedown of contents documenting corporate, environmental, and human rights abuses.
On February 23, just one day after right-wing and Trump supporting accounts were removed as part of an alleged crackdown by Twitter and the German Marshall Fund on "Russian Twitter Bots," 12 accounts opposing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and other trade organisations such as the WTO, were restricted or suspended without explanation. The TTIP and WTO have long been criticised by human rights, environmental, and local campaigners for various reasons, including their promotion of fracking, deregulation, and investor-state-dispute settlement "corporate courts."
YouTube, owned by Google (Alphabet), has also come under fire from activists and independent journalists for deranking humanitarian, Palestinian and anarchist posts under the guise of combating "conspiracy theories." The Empire Files, a documentary series hosted by journalist Abby Martin that has featured interviews with Ahed Tamimi and has exposed Israeli human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories as well as corporate pollution in Ecuador, is being repressed by the search algorithm, making the videos appear only several pages in even if searched for directly by name.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that the company is planning "drastic measures" to remove content based on its source. It also has called for the promotion of information based around a "tight geographical area" near the user, thus implicitly demoting international solidarity, global justice, human rights and multilingual anarchist accounts.
Meanwhile, Twitter has gone on a spree of takedowns of Afrin and YPG-related posts, including a video by the YPG official account that was deleted just hours after its upload.