by Susan Duclos, All News Pipeline:
YouTube is removing videos and Facebook is blocking people from sharing, and in one case that I know of so far, actually banning people from sharing any news on the Las Vegas shooting that doesn’t toe the line and spew only the “official story. They are doing this under the guise of protecting the masses from “fake news.”
CHAOS OF REPORTING & LIBERAL MSM DOUBLE STANDARDS
Having done many live update articles about events that were ongoing, I can personally vouch for the fact that during the event in question, information is reported, corrected, edited and updated, with a note at the bottom usually saying corrections and edits are being made as new information becomes available…….. that is what I call the chaos of reporting during a live event.
Mistakes happen, not just to Independent Media, but some very high profile MSM personalities have incorrectly named suspects in initial reporting, just to have to issue corrections later.
A perfect example of this was the Boston Marathon bombing, where multiple MSM reporters, including Ross Neumann from Reuters, Vice and Digg, former Politico reporter, and now Senior reporter for CNN, Dylan Byers, all misidentified one of the bombing suspects. Another example is when The Daily Beast misidentified one of the San Bernardino shooting suspects.
No one accused these folks of deliberately publishing or sharing “disinformation,” because it falls under the category of “stuff happens,” during the chaos of reporting an ongoing event. Media outlets excuse these mistakes, offer corrections, and move on.
In the case of the Vegas shooter this past week, an Independent News site misidentified the shooter, inaccurately naming Geary Danley, who was the ex-husband of Marilou Danley, the woman that lived with the actual shooter Stephen Paddock, and all of a sudden what is considered chaos of reporting, and a mistake in the cases mentioned above when a MSM reporter or outlet does it, the left is screaming it was deliberate “disinformation,” and “Fake News.”
In the case of the Boston Bombing suspect, media outlets instantly highlighted that the MSM got the suspects name wrong because of some Reddit user, and in the case of the recent mistake by Gateway Pundit, they are accusing them of deliberately spreading fake news because of a theory posed on 4chan.
The only difference between the MSM misidentifying previous suspects and when Gateway Pundit did so, is the left and media outlets instantly blamed Reddit for “smearing” and innocent man when the MSM inaccurately reported, but in the case of the Vegas shooting they are blaming GP and calling it “fake news,” while accusing Facebook, Google and other platforms of allowing fake news to show up in their feeds.
No one said a word about that back in 2013 when the wrong person’s name was shared all over social media as a suspect for the Boston Bombing, or when The Daily Beast story named the wrong suspect in the San Bernardino shooting, but let an Independent Media site make the same innocent mistake and it is all of a sudden the crime of a century and demands for online censorship are blared in every headline.
Nice double standard there, eh?
FAKE NEWS VERSUS DIFFERING VIEWPOINTS
Facebook, Google and its video platform YouTube is now trying to appease the liberal media and leftists across the internet, while implementing measures to make them the “ministry of truth,” by tweaking their algorithms to remove what they determine is “fake news,” and in the process, under the guise of removing disinformation, they are also removing differing viewpoints if those views don’t align with the”official narrative,” being pushed by “authoritative sources.”
YouTube this week surfaced videos peddling misinformation, hateful messages and conspiracy theories to users searching about mainstream news events — problems that caused the site to change its search results to promote more authoritative sources.
For example, the fifth result when searching “Las Vegas shooting” on YouTube late Tuesday yielded a video titled “Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG attack — Shooter on 4th Floor.” The video said there were multiple shooters in Sunday’s mass shooting, a claim refuted by law enforcement. Posted by a channel called the End Times News Report, it had amassed more than 1.1 million views in about 27 hours.
The video in question was taken by a taxi driver at the time of the shooting, showing what appeared to be muzzle flashes matching the timing of shots that could be heard fired. While some point out that a strobe light capturing those flashes was noted before the shooting started, and was not actually another shooter on the fourth floor, that is neither here nor there.
The point here is the video was highlighting something that appeared to be different from what was being reported, it was a differing viewpoint, taken live while events were occurring and was not put out to deliberately mislead, yet in response to criticisms that the videoreceived so much attention (now has 1.4 million views), YouTube is “accelerating the rollout of planned changes to its search engine,” by “promoting more authoritative sources in search results, especially for those about major news events.”
Jake Morphonios, who runs the End Times News Report along with a damaged-inventory-liquidation business in Kernersville, N.C., said the video eventually reached 2.5 million views. “It was a hot topic, of course, and was going to get some views anyway, but it really did get caught in [YouTube’s] algorithm and went viral from there,” he said. “Clearly it got into featured videos or something.” The 43-year-old said he has posted about 800 videos and typically gets about 5,000 views each.
Mr. Morphonios said YouTube gave his account its first strike for the video. YouTube terminates accounts that get three strikes within three months. He said he aims to offer viewers information on news events that mainstream news sources won’t. “I know I’m not as authoritative as The Wall Street Journal or New York Times,” he said. “I’m just a guy with a computer offering an opinion, and to get punished for that is draconian.”
We will get to those “authorative sources” later in the article.
YouTube is not only tweaking their search algorithms though, as noted in an email this morning by Tony over at A Minute to Midnite, YouTube is actively removing content that offers differing viewpoints, while Facebook is preventing sharing and has banned him from posting for a week because of his differing views.
Via the email:
Hi Susan, I made a 6 minute video the other day about the shooting. I used a screenshot of one of your articles in the videoand made sure it was clearly seen that it was ANP and you had written the article.
The video was up for about 2 days and had at least 34,000 views before Youtube took it down. Facebook also banned the video and has banned me from posting in any groups for a week.
I subsequently have uploaded the video to our A minute To Midnite website and written an in depth article analysing some aspects of the shooting……..
The article provided analysis and information widely known at this point, but the banned videodetailed what they saw as Illuminati connections, numerology, and number occult numeric sequences, which is also analysed in the article, and because they were highlighting what they saw as an Illuminati connection, because that is not an “official” narrative by liberals and the giant tech companies like Google/Youtube and Facebook, his video was removed and his Facebook account blocked from sharing anything for a week.
The two examples above are the deliberate censorship by YouTube and Facebook of differing views, while the one below, is an example of how fake news goes viral.
In March 2017, there was a robbery and shooting on the Vegas strip. A woman published a video from inside the Bellagio, showing how the hotel was in lockdown, describing bullets flying, hiding under a table, saying I don’t know what the news is reporting, but this is what is happening here.
After the recent Vegas shooting which killed over 50 people and injured over 500 others, multiple people have re-uploaded that older video, claiming it was from the night of the Vegas massacre, offering it as proof there were multiple shooters. Because of the inconsistencies in the news that has been made public, which has many thinking we are not being told the entire story and the police scanner audio from that night where an officer says “two active shooters” were confirmed, some independent outlets have reported on the re-uploaded video, believing it was new.
The original re-uploaded video came out on October 2, 2017, titled “Las Vegas Proof Not one Shooter Last Night,” with the video description stating “Video taken last night during hotel lockdown at the Bellagio by Rene Downs. Mainstream media not reporting correctly on situation in Vegas.” A search directly for Rene Downs brings up four videos, the original and three others uploaded yesterday, all incorrectly associating the Bellagio lockdown from March with the shooting on October 1st.
The point here is that we have seen this time and time again, where an event happens and old videos are re-uploaded with claims that they are new and related to a recent event, they go viral and next thing you know people are reporting on it.
A look through the account that re-uploaded the Rene Downs video on October 2, 2017, indicates the channel owner has differing views from the MSM official narratives, but was most likely sent this Bellagio video and told it was new, not a deliberate attempt on his part to mislead, but whoever sent it to them, was deliberately trying to push fake news.
There is no easy solution to con-artists, they exist offline and they exist online, it is a fact of life, but YouTube, Facebook and Google thinking they have the right to ban, block, hide and punish any narrative that doesn’t toe the official line, labeling them all “fake news,” is not the answer to preventing these types of online cons. Cons will happen, it is up to us, readers and writers, to dig deeper and find the truth, it is not up to YouTube or other tech giants to declare themselves the “ministry of truth,” and hide whatever they don’t want people to see.
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