Social Media Sites Censor News

“Unreliable News Sources”

The mainstream media skews the news to defend the status quo, and serves the interests of the rich and powerful.

But at least web news sources are free of censorship … one would hope.

Unfortunately, that’s not true.

Facebook pays low-wage foreign workers to delete certain content based upon a censorship list. For example, Facebook deletes accounts created by any Palestinian resistance groups.

Digg was caught censoring stories which were controversial or too critical of the government. See this and this.

Many accuse Youtube of blatant censorship.

Reddit – the 133rd most popular website worldwide on the Internet – is also censoring.

I’m not talking about censoring specific websites (For example, I was informed today that Reddit’s News category censors all stories from this website.  But that’s just an example).  I’m talking about censoring entire categories of news media.

Specifically, Reddit’s WorldNews category has 2.5 million subscribers.  Most tv news shows have less than 2.5 million daily viewers. So that means that Reddit’s WorldNews is itself a mainstream media source in terms of numbers.  And many more people see WorldNews stories on the front page of Reddit, even if they are not subscribers to the WorldNews subreddit.

(Reddit is owned by the 46th largest company in the United States – Advance Publications – which owns a number of mainstream newspapers and magazines.)

Yet WorldNews censors blogs, and doesn’t consider them real news sources.  Here’s a discussion I had recently with WorldNews moderators:

In fact, the top independent experts in every field – economics, business, foreign affairs, military, science, energy, etc. – have their own blogs, making blogs one of the best sources of information, a good way to fact-check the mainstream news, and the best way to read the experts’ insights direct and unfiltered.  See this, this and this.

Indeed, the whole reason that news blogs have become popular is that they get around the censorship which is ubiquitous in the mainstream television news. And social media is popular as a news source – especially among youth – because it pretends that it provides uncensored news, where a free market of popularity governs.

That’s obviously not the case, where specific websites – and entire classes of media, such as blogs – are barred.

Reddit holds itself out as a young, hip, progressive news source.  But if it is censoring blogs, it fails to live up to any of these claims.

The government already censors and manipulates social media. More proof here and here.

It is sad that the moderators of the social media sites themselves are doing the same thing.