Did you hear the one about social media having a liberal bias? Yeah, right.
Facebook has allowed conservative news outlets and personalities to repeatedly spread false information without facing any of the company’s stated penalties, according to leaked materials reviewed by NBC News.
According to internal discussions from the last six months, Facebook has relaxed its rules so that conservative pages, including those run by Breitbart, former Fox News personalities Diamond and Silk, the nonprofit media outlet PragerU and the pundit Charlie Kirk, were not penalized for violations of the company’s misinformation policies.
Misinformation is OK if you are a Republican. Better yet, it’s the breath of life for those asshats. Oh, and bite me, Facebook.
In related news, never buy anything from Teespring. They’re fine with selling merchandise with swastikas, but don’t you dare add a rainbow to it. They’ll yank the hippie-dippy love & peace apparel from their product line, but if you want a black t-shirt with Nazi symbols all over it, no problem.
Teespring, which is owned by KA Design, says it didn’t sell any of the design and didn’t profit from it. In a video on its Facebook page, KA Design said the swastika is thousands of years old and is a symbol of peace, love, life and other ideas. But the Nazi party corrupted that symbol, the company added.
“[T]hey stigmatized the swastika forever. They won. They limited our freedom. Or maybe not? The swastika is coming back,” the video said.
Sure, Nazis corrupted it and made it representative of their hateful ideology. That’s a significant part of its history now. It ain’t coming back until everyone forgets WWII and the Nazis and the Holocaust, so everyone can just stop playing stupid and stop pretending that shameful blight on the world never existed.
smeghead says
You mentioned not even the dumbest thing about Teespring, which is denouncing fascism by… removing Anitfa merch, at least for the time being:
https://twitter.com/teespring/status/1291855415320420353
Ouabache says
The Republicans have been working the refs for a long time because this is exactly the result they wanted. They cried about free speech and censorship on social media because they want to post whatever they want without consequences.
fishy says
Fairness Doctrine R.I.P. 1987
Fast forward to Shock and Awe. 2003.
Our, “News,” agencies were champing at the bit for a chance to be a part of WAR coverage.
TV news spent money on sets, models, experts, embedded journalists and an extremely annoying chyron.
Smoking gun. Mushroom cloud.
There is no Liberal Media.
I doubt if there ever was.
drew says
All making the ubiquitous christers’ corruption of the noble letter T into a symbol of torture and subservience seem acceptable, even quaint.
Devious Brownies says
“the swastika is thousands of years old and is a symbol of peace, love, life and other ideas”
Okay, so how old are rainbows again?
paulparnell says
fishy #3,
The Fairness Doctrine died from becoming irrelevant. It was only constitutional because the airwaves were a limited publicly owned asset. It did not apply to print newspapers and could not have been enforced on today’s internet for obvious constitutional reasons.
People on both the left and right want to repeal section 230 because of the problem with content moderation. But section 230 does not actually change anything. It only functions as an anti-SLAPP type provision. We need to double down on 230 with a national anti-SLAPP law and then follow it with a anti-SLAPP type mechanism to protect people from bogus DMCA claims.
Interesting factoid… Ronald Reagan was advised by his staff to oppose the end of the Fairness Doctrine. They feared the liberal media.
Ray Ceeya says
The GOP’s level of hypocrisy seems bottomless and their supply of double standards seems endless. I’ve been wondering, If I start a Twitter account and start pushing the buttons, how long would it take to get myself banned. What if I simply quoted Trump’s Tweets but swapped BLM references with NRA figures? I’ll bet I wouldn’t make it a week.
StonedRanger says
The ancient swastika is not the same as the nazi swastika. The nazi one is the reverse of the one used for thousands of years. So its not the same one.
paulparnell says
StonedRanger #8,
Not that it matters but no. The ancient swastica was used in both left and right forms.
mnb0 says
As soon as all neo-nazis and other white supremacists start making propaganda for AOC etc. I’ll accept that the swastika is a symbol of peace, love, life etc.
Deal?
blf says
Wasn’t the rainbow mentioned by some magic sky fairies as a sign they wouldn’t pee on the planet again? As I recall, a certain Mr Noah is the expert here…
robertbaden says
It was shocking at first to see the swastika pop up in Korean historical movies. Apparently they don’t have the same reaction to it as westerners.
timgueguen says
You’ll see it in Japanese and Chinese productions as well. I was pretty surprised years ago watched the Japanese martial arts film Sister Street Fighter when the title character enters a Shorinji Kempo dojo, as they were using the swastika as a symbol in the ’70s. Even then they realised it was problematic in the West, and replaced it abroad with the ken character, which means fist.
paulparnell says
mnb0 #10,
Symbols mean what we mean by them. In the parts of the world where the symbol originated it is still used in its original sense. The Nazi usage was cultural appropriation.
We keep granting ownership of symbols to the worst people that misused them. From the swastika to the ok sign and Pepe le frog we keep granting ownership of symbols to assholes. That does not seem like a good idea to me.
In the west, the swastika is likely to be a reference to nazis. But we should remember that it is a bit of stolen culture and attempt to return it. Check your western privilege?
nomdeplume says
It seems increasingly clear, in spite of popular belief, that neither the Confederates nor the Nazis actually lost their respective wars in the long term.
paulparnell says
nomdeplume #15,
Both the confederacy and nazi Germany were defeated. What was not defeated and never will be defeated is the human tribalistic authoritarian instinct. It is older than humanity itself. The nazi you most need to worry about is the one inside yourself.
The republican party was founded to fight slavery. Today it is possessed by the undead spirit of the old confederacy.
The French revolution took down the privileged class in France. They penned the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”. They then cranked up the guillotine in the reign of terror and then became a totalitarian state under Napoleon.
The Russian people took down their aristocracy in a similar way. They then became an authoritarian nightmare for the next 75 years. They are still dominated by an authoritarian strong man. But then so are we. The only thing helping us is that the power of the presidency and the government itself is limited.
Nazi Germany? It was a mercifully brief but very bloody example of the phenomena.
garydargan says
If you look at India today and see The pogroms against non-Hindus spurred on by their fascist PM, Narendra Modi who used the Hindu religion to rise to power, the original swastika is a symbol of hate regardless of Hitler’s appropriation of it.
jrkrideau says
@ 12 robertbaden
My family had a set of Kipling’s works pre-WWI and the swastika was embossed on the spines of the books.
There is a tiny village in Northern Ontario named Swastika. When Canada entered WWII, it was proposed to change the name but the people decided they had the name before the Nazis and would have long after the Nazis
woozy says
We don’t grant them. The assholes force them on us. And we can’t individually give them back.
And we do mean what we mean by them, and we can’t pretend we don’t.
The story of this is not how PZ described it. The company is designing t-shirts with swatstikas on rainbow backgrounds with the words “love” or “zen” printed on them as one black tee with the swastika horizontally aligned (not rotated at a 45 degree angle) in white and gray. They are naively attempting to “return the swastika”.
But the results are disastrous.
The symbol means what it means and it does mean Nazism. And we cant niavely pretend it hasn’t been corrupted.
mailliw says
Displaying the Swastika publicly is illegal here in Germany, and rightly so.
birgerjohansson says
Soo…can I buy a red armband with a picture of Trump at the place where the swastika usually goes?
BTW I am reminded of Dave Chapelle and the sketch where gay clansmen in pink robes try to get black people to move away. This must present a problem for Facebook. The clansmen are OK but what about the gayness?