Says you! I heard they were mind-control chips, not tracking chips! 
It’s not as clear cut as that. Even these boards do have some rules. Shills posting to bump specific stocks is prohibited for example so it’s not everything goes without any moderation. Moderators and founders decided on a set of rules and it’s our choice to abide by them or use other financial forums. Similarly, as a private company, doesn’t Facebook have a right to decide and moderate what content gets published on their platform? Doesn’t Fox have full authority in what programming they decide to air? I don’t think that lack of political bias is something private companies are bound to enforce.
Asking anybody to prove a negative is a bit disingenuous. By design, it’s extremely hard to do regardless of the case being investigated. I could claim that someone is using nanofluidic devices as better “microchips” than those alleged by the magnetized outraged folks. What evidence would you provide to convince me that none can be found in the COVID shots? So IMO in cases of really outlandish claims, the onus of first providing some believable evidence collected in a controlled testing environment, falls onto those making these claims. Otherwise we could very unproductively chase chimeras until the cows come home.
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See the discussion of section 230 of the Communications Act on this thread. Facebook says they are NOT a publishing company but simply a forum. Based on this, they use Sec 230 to shield themselves from legal liability for false and defamatory posts on their website. But they are a publisher IMO because they censor posts on their websites based on the political viewpoint.
Fox News is a publisher and admits it and they can be sued for libel for anything they publish.
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Here’s a way to attack the leftist social media giants:
The best way to fight social media censorship is to promote model state legislation all across the country that gives users the right to sue when a tech platform engages in discrimination, John Hinderaker, president of Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview.
the goal of right-to-sue model legislation “is to ban discrimination in the moderation of content on social media sites on the basis of race, sex, religion, or political orientation.”
“These tech companies cannot afford to keep getting sued, particularly if some of the major states like Texas and Florida pass the right kind of legislation,” Hinderaker told The Epoch Times in the interview.
“I really think it’s the one thing that could cause the tech companies to just give it up.”
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and the weather. 
Yes, Facebook becoming the arbiter of truth is certainly the harbinger of George Orwell’s predictions.
// humor mode on, channeling algore
In fact, I predict that within the next 100 years, unless we do something RIGHT NOW, Facebook will be renamed as the Ministry of Truth.
// humor mode off, putting algore back in the lockbox.
ETA: One recent reminder of Facebook’s perspicacity …
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[Wish I’d asked this sooner, and probably avoided all that followed.]
So, "I’m not going to get the vaccine because I think the vaccine is a plot by Bill Gates to implant tracking chips in everyone” is fine, right?
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I think it should be fine written like this. The difference is that it is not phrased as a factual statement that the vaccine has been proven to contain chips, just a personal decision/opinion.
On the other hand, I think this may get banned:
"I’m not going to get the vaccine because it is a well known fact that the vaccine is a plot by Bill Gates to implant tracking chips in everyone”
But the issue is over
"“I’m not going to get the vaccine because the vaccine is a plot by Bill Gates to implant tracking chips in everyone”
And it’s an issue because when that statement is read, some people assume the underlying premise is “I think”, while others want to inject “it is a well known fact”. And this is where beliefs separate from facts - despite what some insist, the only fact being asserted in that comment is that the speaker believes this to be true.
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By the way Senator Rand Paul is also a medical doctor
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That’s a fair point. But the issue becomes the increasing cultivation of this ambiguity between implied personal opinion and statement of fact.
Take Fox programming for example. You have, next to one another, a segment of proper news embedded in a series of opinion segments. Not many people have the critical thinking to realize that the News part of the Fox Network will likely stick much more closely to the facts (and thus be much more trustworthy) than the opinion segments. Same on other outlets like CNN. You have to look carefully for whether some piece is from an opinion contributor or directly from their news desk. Many just hear/read an opinion piece and take that as facts, not solely the personal belief of the presenter.
This is the reason why I rarely read opinion pieces even on outlets with less left- or right-bias than the aforementioned because frankly they just inject too much speculation on the facts. And many pieces in too many outlets are not stating clearly whether they are just reporting on facts or offering an opinion on them. Many times the blurring of this boundary appears to be completely intentional so that opinions can be confused for news reporting. In my experience, this is a practice that is just amplified on social media.
I’m not sure whether the solution is the social media platform owners doing the sorting out of facts vs. fiction unilaterally but I think it’d be within their authority to add some kind of flag that something is purely a speculative opinion vs. a proven fact vs. a proven falsehood.
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do you think that the articles from the left-wing media like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA today, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN etc. are not opinion pieces and do not have propaganda or speculation?
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That’s the kicker - it’s a universal thing, yet the supression bias only goes one way. I think it’d be much less of an issue if applied consistently, but the same basis used to block some things is used to endorse others.
There’s a growing, habitual, and rather gross obsession with people to inject their own context into the comments of others, then judging the commentor based on that context moreso than what was actually said.
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I believe that was true 20 or 25 years ago. Today, the news desks themselves, by supposition or choice of stories is slanted, just more subtly.
Sorry for the long story, but it is applicable … or I think it is. 
I was laid up for a few months during the 1992 party primaries. CNN spent a great deal of time and money following candidates to their various appearances. Being unable to do anything other than listen to/watch tv, I listened to CNN for the entire day. They followed Pat Buchanan as he campaigned around Mississippi. They did a pretty thorough job following him to several stops. Among the stops that I recall was a cemetery at a black church, a diner in ?McComb?, and a cemetery which contained, among others, the plots of CSA soldiers. There were at least three others stops that they lightly covered. That night, NBC Nightly news spent 45 seconds on Pat Buchanan’s divisive visit to a cemetery honoring the CSA fallen - not one more second on him.
There were no protesters at either cemetery, and CNN would have showed/mentioned them. Here, finally, is my point - NBC chose to show Pat Buchanan as someone who spent a day honoring CSA soldiers, in a blatant disregard of the facts. I was not a Pat Buchanan fan, nor did I vote for him. I felt betrayed and misled by NBC news for what they did. They would have been more fair, but not fair, by not mentioning him at all.
My apologies for the ramble, but it explains exactly why I don’t trust any news “source”, and will look at multiple, diverse sources.
ETA … just to make this even longer: I had a hard time believing that I wasn’t mistaken by the influence of pain medication, so I paid attention for 6 more weeks. In those six weeks, I learned to discard NBC, ABC, and CBS as trustworthy news sources. I already had enough sense to never consider PBS as trustworthy for news … maybe antique appraisals, but not news.
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These days most of the news sources have decided “advocacy” of their preferred political positions are more important than presenting unbiased news, or even presenting facts at all should they prove inconvenient for their favorites (Tara who?). Here’s NPR and NYT’s recent descent into admitted partisanship rather than even keeping a pretense of journalism.
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Correct. Even the choice of coverage can form a bias but that’s almost impossible to avoid. News desk have to sell ads too so they’ll stick mostly to stories they think that will keep their viewers reading/watching.
I imagine the uneventful Buchanan stops were deemed boring or not fitting the narrative they want to push so they only put forth the potentially divisive cemetery one. There was also potentially the decision on how much time to dedicate and what to choose to show from all his stops that day. Yeah it’s not as accurate coverage but it’s not just opinion either. Some in the media nowadays would likely cover it only with an outraged anchor stating that Buchanan aches for the good ol’ days of the Confederation as evidenced by him dedicating his day to honoring its fallen soldiers. One coverage is painting a potentially misleading picture, the other is passing judgement and voicing strongly biased opinion based on distorted facts.
But to me, without going into specific, that still means that news articles -regardless of outlet - are a lesser evil than the pervasive opinion pieces that are solely about throwing red meat at their respective bases like right-biased and left-biased outlets do constantly. But sadly the ratio of news to opinion lately has been going down dramatically. Like you mentioned 20 years ago, you’d barely have opinion segments here and there, now you barely have news segments here and there instead. That’s not good news - no pun intended - for the signal-to-noise ratio of reliable information.
Isn’t it weird that this opinion complains about NPR’s decision to let their reporter express support for whatever causes they want, while also decrying calls for increased censorship by various entities? Wouldn’t NPR’s decision be viewed as a removal of censorship over what causes their reporters can advocate? That struck me as paradoxical and was confusing to me. Should NPR have continued to censor their reporters?
There’s also quite a bit of pot calling kettle black with the outrage at reporters calling others “enemies of the state” in opinion pieces. That phrase has been used and abused liberally lately as an outrage-building device by a lot of people on both sides it seems to me. Nothing new in opinion land. It just confirms to me that opinion contributor pieces are completely worthless IMO.
You are being naïve about the pervasive bias of what passes for news media nowadays. To quote Glenn Reynolds, so-called reporters are really Democrat operatives with bylines.
The coverage of the Hunter Biden laptops is one example out of many. The blanket censoring of the new story before the election is well known
Another laptop has surfaced and is again ignored by the US news media. See this post by Jonathan Turley. Yes an opinion piece but backed up with evidence.
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Not paradoxical at all. I remember from watching old movies that journalists were supposed to report verifiable facts and not opinions. The crusty old editor in the movies would tell the reporter “just tell me who, what, where, and when”. Advocating for causes was not part of the journalist’s job.
I agree that reporters and editors always biased the choice of news stories they cover. That is different from expressing their opinions in the reports,
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I am rarely one to post much political stuff directly on my own Facebook page. But if a friend posts something worthy of discussion or there is a comment on a friend’s post I want to respond to, I will. I’ve never had a political opinion post removed by facebook before. Yesterday, Facebook took down one of my comments in response to a friend that shared a Mike Rowe post. Can anyone here explain to me how this is considered spam?
The blocked out items are people’s names. The red exclamation point came up when I tried to reply to my own comment, but it had been taken down so the reply wouldn’t post.
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