Facebook’s Process to Label You a ‘Hate Agent’ Revealed

Posted on June 14, 2019 by Luke Ford

From Breitbart:

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social media giant.
The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of “signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform.

Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior. If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate agent.”

Facebook may also categorize you as a hate agent if you self-identify with or advocate for a “Designated Hateful Ideology,” if you associate with a “Designated Hate Entity” (one of the examples cited by Facebook as a “hate entity” includes Islam critic Tommy Robinson), or if you have “tattoos of hate symbols or hate slogans.” (The document cites no examples of these, but the media and “anti-racism” advocacy groups increasingly label innocuous items as “hate symbols,” including a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand sign.)

Facebook will also categorize you as a hate agent for possession of “hate paraphernalia,” although the document provides no examples of what falls into this category.

The document also says Facebook will categorize you as a hate agent for “statements made in private but later made public.” Of course, Facebook holds vast amounts of information on what you say in public and in private — and as we saw with the Daily Beast doxing story, the platform will publicize private information on their users to assist the media in hitjobs on regular American citizens.

Breitbart News has already covered some of the individuals that Facebook placed on its list of potential “hate agents.” Paul Joseph Watson eventually was categorized as “hateful” and banned from the platform, in part, according to the document, because he praised Tommy Robinson and interviewed him on his YouTube channel. Star conservative pundit Candace Owens and conservative author and terrorism expert Brigitte Gabriel were also on the list, as were British politicians Carl Benjamin and Anne Marie Waters.

The Benjamin addition reveals that Facebook may categorize you as a hate agent merely for speaking neutrally about individuals and organizations that the social network considers hateful. In the document, Facebook tags Benjamin with a “hate agent” signal for “neutral representation of John Kinsman, member of Proud Boys” on October 21 last year.

Facebook also accuses Benjamin, a classical liberal and critic of identity politics, as “representing the ideology of an ethnostate” for a post in which he calls out an actual advocate of an ethnostate.

In addition to the more unorthodox signals that Facebook uses to determine if its users are “hate agents,” there is also, predictably, “hate speech.” Facebook divides hate speech into three tiers depending on severity and considers attacks on a person’s “immigration status” to be hate speech.

Here’s how “hate speech” — both on and off Facebook — will be categorized by the platform, according to the document:

Individual has made public statements, or statements made in private and later made public, using Tier 1, 2, or 3 hate speech or slurs:

3 instances in one statement or appearance = signal
5 instances in multiple statements or appearances over one month = signal

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Accepting Reality

Posted on June 12, 2019 by Luke Ford

Kyle Rowland writes: Reactionary thinkers often note the importance of differences. That is to say, they note that different races, different genders, different classes, different individuals have different traits, and to some extent must be treated differently. If someone is violently inclined, they must be treated differently from someone who is peaceful. If a community is violently inclined, they must be treated differently from a community that is distinctly well-behaved. A crime-ridden neighborhood needs different policing strategies than a calm neighborhood.

Reactionaries note that this is not only necessary, but inevitable. No matter how loudly one protests against this principle, reality inexorably forces you to act in accordance with it. White Northerners decried how Blacks in the South were treated — and when those Blacks came north en-masse, similar behavior emerged from Northern Whites. When liberal whites are faced with similar incentives and dangers from crime, their hand is forced, and they deploy de-facto segregation and mass incarceration to make their neighborhoods safe.

The attitude towards these measures can change radically and quickly through politics, but the fact of this disparate treatment and impact is hard if not impossible to eradicate. Reactionaries note that the refusal to face reality has bizarre and perverse downstream effects — liberal elites self-flagellate with ever more vigor, spiraling into despair and fury in the face of an ‘unacceptable’ reality.

But just as liberals writhe in agony before a reality they have declared unacceptable, the alt-right declares the same reality unacceptable from a different angle. They say – we cannot bear this conflict that arises from differences between races, it is unbearable, it is unsustainable, it has to collapse, it is an abomination!

So it is that erudite scholars who are investigating and quantifying racial differences have the mic seized from them by hyperventilating alt-right morons who append: “YES, ALL OF THIS IS TRUE, AND THIS IS WHY AMERICA WILL COLLAPSE, THIS IS WHY EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART! 1488! THE JOOOOOOOOS!”

The reality is that the problems that arise from racial differences are evidently bounded and bearable. They have been borne for the entire history of the United States. With the burden of racial conflict weighing it down, the US became the most powerful nation in the world by every major metric.

That means there is a limit to how heavy a burden racial conflict must be. Moreover, it points to one of the biggest sources of confusion and noise in politics – histrionic morons with no sense of perspective, acting like their pet issue is what the world revolves around, drawing the attention from rational people with realistic perspectives and solutions.

America has always been multiracial, but racial tensions hurt the country primarily through a second-order effect. When political factions declare an unsolvable problem “UNACCEPTABLE” and devote inordinate amounts of resources and attention towards it, this leads to a crescendo of conflict. When the nation was at its most peaceful and united, all of the first-order problems inherent to multiracial countries were still present, ineradicable. There were still vast asymmetries in violence and life outcomes, as there had been long before the nation was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. They did not threaten the nation, as they amounted to pinpricks on a giant.

What has threatened the nation multiple times is conflict over what these differences in outcome signify, and how they may or may not be solved. This is where brother turns against brother, where recriminations and resentment festers. HBD provides a way to defuse this powder keg — the differences are inherent and, at least for now, ineradicable. They are also evidently bearable, as they have been borne while the most powerful nation on earth blossomed from a forsaken scattering of colonies. The solution is to learn that you can choose whether to accept reality or not – not whether reality will continue to present itself to you.

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Is Google Calling Trump’s Bluff?

Posted on June 12, 2019 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Alphabet is calling Trump’s bluff. They may have concluded, with justification, that Trump is too weak and ditzy to actually go after his enemies and press an anti-trust case. The risk here is that even if the Democratic Congress and the Republican cucks can slow or thwart anti-trust prosecutions, the financial robustness of these companies is regarded with a jaundiced eye by many investors. They are running a risk that simply initiating the actions, even if they don’t go anywhere, could trigger a bloodbath as the smart money cashes out its chips and heads for the exits. There is something of a gamble going on here that Trump won’t do anything that would trigger a 2008 style Wall Street collapse. Either way, the scorpion can’t resist stinging the frog, even knowing what will happen afterwards.

* If Google does not play its cards right they will run into issues down the road when they try to launch things like driver-less cars and AI. Without the government’s and public’s cooperation, they will never be able to operate. The Justice can also block future mergers which it probably should anyway.

The internet is a cash cow but the technological edge they have is fleeting and consumers can change literally at the click of a button. Once it all comes out that they have been spying on our peccadilloes and using the information to overturn democracy they will be the once cut out of the future.

* The (somewhat questionable) Matthew Shepard story got hundreds of times the ink as did Jesse Dirkhising’s murder. Because the latter was dog-bites-man.

Heck, Gary Trzaska’s murder in Buffalo on the same night as Shepard’s got a microscopic amount of coverage in comparison. Five black teens beat a white queer to death? That’s just another Friday night in Buffalo.

* Last week, its YouTube unit demonetized numerous conservative channels, apparently after being bullied into doing so by one journalist.

Sure, “one journalist” — the ADL and other Jewish organizations are and have been the ones pushing hardest for censorship — the one homo journalist was just a convenient pretext to deflect blame.

Assuming the action against GOOG moves forward, it will be interesting to compare the language GOOG uses to defend their censorship campaign against ‘hate’ to the language the Supreme Court used to uphold racial discrimination affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger.

* I think once the bodycam footage came out, the police slaughter of Daniel Shaver story did generate a fair amount of public interest. (Recall that it was the girlfriend’s video of Castile bleeding out that was the vehicle for mass hysteria in what otherwise would have been a he-said-she-said text story.)

The NYT et al. declining to cover Daniel Shaver is an active, not a reactive decision. There is a chicken and egg dynamic, or “Megaphonics” as Steve calls it. By not promoting the story (in particular by not inserting it into their Opinion piece outrage machine) the story doesn’t generate buzz. By promoting a story, the story does generate buzz. So the “newsworthiness” of these events is still fairly self-fulfilling, and it is not really accurate to say that “white men shot dead” “don’t generate enough ‘clicks’”. They could, if the Megaphone holders chose to promote it.

Anyhow, most of these papers abandoned the profit motive long ago and are now run by ideologues backed by billionaires, so they don’t really care what the public is interested in.

* If it came to be known that Police make mistakes of judgment in high intensity situations involving suspects of all colors including white men, it would be much more difficult to maintain the narrative and political mobilization useful for fringe coalition politics.

I don’t think it’s much more complicated than curating the information that forms the daily news cycle in such a way as to conform to their politics and worldview.

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From Blogosphere to Vlogosphere

Posted on June 12, 2019 by Luke Ford

Anatoly Karlin writes:

times the views as writing out a more labor intensive and K-selected blog post.

The Alt Right child prodigy “soph” – recently profiled by Mr. Bernstein – is currently just shy of a million subscribers on YouTube. She has had 17 million views since she started her (rather irregular) vlogging career in August 2015. That’s approximately what the Unz Review currently generates in half a year, and we have far, far more visitors now than we did even just a couple of years ago.

The typical video by the psychometrist Edward Dutton – probably the most high profile HBD vlogger – gets around 10,000-20,000 views. I am reasonably sure that this is well above what the typical article by James Thompson here gets. My most popular “HBD” article ever – The Idiocy of the Average – got something like 40,000 views IIRC. The Golden One, a Swedish alt right pagan bodybuilder whose videos I recently binge watched, has 100,000 subscribers, and most of his videos – rather low effort productions with minimal editing or graphics – get at least 20,000 views. The most high profile vloggers make enough money to make a comfortable living (Sargon of Akkad was getting $15,000 from YouTube ads before they demonetized his account)….

Where has that old blogosphere gone?

(1) Many of the small, old school bloggers just stopped blogging. It was the digital venereal disease that is social media that killed them off more than anything else from around 2010. To have a vigorous blogosphere, you need a tightly connected network of independent bloggers bouncing ideas and arguments off each other, but when 75% of them have migrated to Twitter, there’s no longer sufficient scope in the community to generate the vigorous and counter-argument on which the old blogosphere thrived.

(2) Some bloggers were snapped up by larger websites. As a rule, the ones with stable backing from moneyed patrons were the main ones that survived and thrived (e.g. this very venue).

(3) Some parts of the blogging HBDsphere have gone into or were recruited into actual science. This is perhaps the single biggest positive development.

(4) Rising SJWism has also forced many of these discussions into closed boards, mailing lists, and Slack chats (this describes NRx and the HBDsphere).

Comments at Anatoly Karlin:

* One historical analogy to consider, is that a century ago a very similar Poz also took hold in advanced society, in Weimar Germany, where the world’s first ‘trans-gender’ clinic opened there in 1919. – In 1933 that clinic was burned to the ground by the Hitler Youth. The pendulum may swing yet again.

* Trying to negotiate and plead completely failed. Power does not relent peacefully. Swedish people, en masse, created a bunch of organic socities. The first unions were created like this. The co-operate grocer stores (which were co-owned by the shoppers themselves) were created like this. ABF – arbetarnas bildningsförbund – was created like this in order to educate the workers about their rights, and also to increase literacy. This was before universal education. This went on in sphere after sphere. Collective bargaining power is a mighty thing indeed once it fully blooms.

What happened in Sweden was essentially a state within a state, that massively increased its bargaining power vis-a-vis powerful corporations and forced its hand. YouTube is acting on pressure from Jewish lobbies but also USG pressure. There is no free market. If the “free market” esisted then YouTube would not purge these people, because it is manifestly popular and it brings in money. They are purged because of ideological pressure, giving to lie to the myth of the “free market”.

A problem for many people on the Alt Right is that they are basically racist libertarians. Many people came from libertarian and/or conservative backgrounds and still carry that baggage, so they idealise markets. But markets are not your friends and left untouched, a natural tendecy to oligarchy and/or monopoly will happen. In Sweden, nationalists are already starting to work on similar projects. Dan Eriksson has plans to create a large number of houses for Swedish nationalists, where we can have conferences and/or just hang out. The first house has already been opened. People talk about taking this approach to many other areas of life and I think this is needed.

At the risk of sounding stereotypical, we really do need to Think Big™. Censorship will only increase in the future and hiding in the shadows trying to get money is not a viable solution, it’s a rationalisation for cowards. Only mass organising is a viable long-term path, and it needs to happen now. Depending on a small number of donors is a critical mistake. A decentralised system is far harder to beat, as various Swedish oligarchs discovered over a century ago.

* I download all the videos I am interested in and just convert them to audio-only formats like .m4a. I only listen to them when walking, commuting, at the gym etc. Most of the content is just debating, so actually seeing video is completely unnecessary.

Secondly, even if the amount of vloggers have increased, everyone have their personal taste. I like some podcasts a lot more even if their quality is about equal to others simply because I like their personalities more. There is a lot of repetition across the WN/AR vloggersphere, so you only need to pick out a few you like and that will cover your bases. I don’t think people watch/listen to as much as you think they do.

Lastly, a lot of podcasts are focused on particular regions. I won’t get Sweden-specific stuff from a US podcast. Just as a Russian guy wouldn’t get his Russian politics podcast from a Swedish stuff. And you always want to mix the local with the international to get a good mix. It’s not good to be too isolated, just as it is bad too be too unmoored from your roots and surrounding.

* I don’t get the popularity of videos. I can’t really watch Ed Dutton or any other youtube personality. They are just endlessly wordy. The information density is so low, I occasionally just skim through the transcript.

The question is whether viewership is really the essential thing. A quality audience also counts for something.

* I think that a big part of the solution is technological. Why has the Pirate Bay been able to stay online despite massive attempts to shut it down? Because 1) many jurisdictions are available to move the website to, 2) making a full backup of the website and moving between these jurisdictions is easy and fast

Neither (1) nor especially (2) is currently true for accounts on social networks such as Youtube, Twitter, Facebook or Patreon. If your account is censored or deleted for whatever reason (for example, the Terms of Service change), it can be extremely time-consuming to move your operations anywhere else, and the more content is in your account, the longer it takes (and you also lose all comments & subscribers).

This is like feudalism. A few landlords, many peasants. And no Yuri’s Day, either.

So anyway,
The solution for (1) already kind of exists – federated social media such as Peertube, MediaGoblin, Diaspora. PeerTube is like many different Youtubes, with “instances” that can be hosted by anyone, all of which can communicate with each other (well, unless they block other instances) and share data. Go to any PeerTube instance, and you’ll see a familiar interface. Moreover, the hosting costs are low because the videos stay up with BitTorrent.
The problem is that without (2), anyone signing up to one of these is no better off than with Youtube – in fact, things can be much more draconian, because any instance can be hosted by just a random guy with no reputation to worry about if he decides to go nuts and ban everyone.

Unfortunately, account migration is not currently possible in any of these projects.

Not in PeerTube:
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/549

Not even in Diaspora, where it had been advertised as a huge feature since 2011, yet absolutely no progress has been made:
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/908

So watch this space. The day that easy account migration becomes possible on one of these federated social media sites is the day that control over discourse begins to decentralize once again.

https://transferring-videos.com might work as a stopgap solution to (2) for some. It’s limited to only the few big Western social media sites, but at least it means that some of your content will remain up unless there’s a coordinated attack against you across all those sites. (which is, really, the direction things are going in. Federated social media with easy account migration would be preferable, but it doesn’t exist yet)

* Some videos are high signal to noise. It’s not inherently a bad format, any more than some vapid celebrity podcast is akin to Bach just because they’re both “sound”.

The problem with YouTube is that a few years back, for reasons best known to them, they decided to prioritize “length of time viewers spend watching a video” rather than “how much viewers like a video”. The result was to make YouTube more similar to television. You’d think the boomers who run YouTube really missed the old idiot box. The new system rewards those who stretch things out as long as possible, and punishes those who like to make videos that are “short and packed”.

This algorithm change put some animators out of business (animation requires a lot of labour per unit of footage, which previously had been offset by their high popularity). One artist I was following at the time (SexualLobster – yeah, his stuff was rather degenerate, but amusing) had his YouTube income cut in half, tried to keep going with just Patreon for a while, then seemed to give up and went to work for a studio.

* Video is a valid format when there is visual content to be presented. Cinema being the classic, but by no means only, example.

Video as a substitute for text, which is what most vlogging consists of, is for illiterate plebeians. As a means of transmitting non-visual information video has inherently lower bandwidth than text which makes vlog consumption a gigantic waste of time.

That vlogging far exceeds blogging in popularity is evidence that 90% or more of the human population should be eradicated.

* I couldn’t understand why YouTube allowed thought crime content for so long. I assumed they allowed it so that ZOGist intel agencies could monitor who was drawn to the content and study the progression of radicalization. This also allowed them to steer people toward their assets such as David Duke and Dick Spencer. Now they are shutting it down. Have they gathered enough data now? Why allow it for so long? I remember being puzzled by this way back in 2012.

It is clear smart phones have killed our attention spans. It’s harder than ever to read books. Things are winding down, the frogs are gay, the libraries are filled with drag queens. Buy and hold Bitcoin brothers, that’s all we have left.

* Television intruded on the influence of newspapers and news magazines. Now YouTube is pushing blogs aside. It seems like the same pattern.

Also, there has always been elite control of most influential media. Hearst comes to mind: “Remember the Maine!”*

Furthermore, down through history, mass media have always had to be K-selected in order to reach the masses, because the portion of the audience with high comprehension and analytical aptitude has always been small. Until relatively recently, huge numbers of people couldn’t even read; they learned by word of mouth or from priests and public speakers.

So, today we see the same thing. Spoken-word mediocrity continues in the form of YouTube, and that becomes the channel of ideas for the largest number of people among those who even care about understanding the world.

#257 6-12-19 From Blogs To Vlogs To Where After YouTube, Have Dissidents Anywhere To Go?

00:00 Steve Sailer: The Great Awokening Conspiracy Theory
06:00 Kyle Rowland on HBD
11:00 KMG arrives: From Blogs To Vlogs To Where? After YouTube, Have Dissidents Anywhere To Go?
1:29:00 Women’s Soccer: Ugly American Women On The Pitch
1:50:00 Pride Month Roundup [incorporates Kirsten Gillibrand & Elizabeth Warren Go Nuts, Florist Targeted By Gays & Masterpiece Cakeshop Sued Again, 180 Companies Come Out For Abortion & “Gestational Slavery” Under Attack]
2:12:00 Immigration Roundup [incorporates George Will Chooses The Economy Over Americans, Immigration As Revenge (NYT Op-Ed), Congolese Dumped In San Antonio & Illegals Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Papers]
2:34:00 God Says Women Shouldn’t Settle
3:12:00 David Weissman: Why I left team MAGA
3:24:00 Our culture needed an adult. Gayle King rose to the challenge.
3:32:00 Senator Hawley Attacks Pelagianism
3:37:00 Crimestopping By Genetics

Posted in Blogging, Censorship, Youtube | Comments Off on From Blogosphere to Vlogosphere

Google May Have Just Increased The Chances Of Antitrust Action Against It

Posted on June 10, 2019 by Luke Ford

David Pinsen writes: Last week, I wrote that Alphabet (GOOG), (GOOGL) had an inauspicious weekend, mainly due to the news that the U.S. Department of Justice was preparing an antitrust investigation into it. You would think that Alphabet’s Google would have wanted to lay low after that, but instead its YouTube subsidiary “demonetized” a number of right-leaning channels, most prominently Steven Crowder’s, as Fox New’s Tucker Carlson discussed with journalist Glenn Greenwald in the video below (videos are normally monetized on YouTube via ads, enabling both the video’s creators and YouTube to profit).

The focus at Seeking Alpha is on investing, rather than politics, so I don’t want to dwell too much on the politics here, except to note that Glenn Greenwald is on the left politically, and dislikes Crowder, but opposes YouTube’s actions on principle. The investment-specific issue here is that Google’s actions are increasing the company’s risk by drawing further antitrust scrutiny and possibly exposing it to shareholder litigation, as I elaborate below.

YouTube’s demonetization wasn’t limited to Crowder: Smaller channels were hit too, including Luke Ford’s as Ford mentions below (coincidentally, I had mentioned Ford’s channel to Seeking Alpha’s CEO as an example of the potential of the medium, at a meeting in April).

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