The following account resulted from my attempt to leave a comment (more than one, in fact) to a story on NBC News entitled, "Russia Plans to Target Dissidents in Ukraine to be killed or sent to camps, U.S. Says," written by Andrea Mitchell and Dennis Romero sometime very early this morning. I innocently tried to leave a response to a post by a commenter attacking Justin Trudeau, in which the writer characterized Trudeau as a "monster" whose "Daddy" was "Fidal."
This writer, named Athanasios May, either does not know the actual spelling of the first name of the late leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, or else was never taught to edit his writing before publishing.
So I encouraged him to do so, with a little snark added, in capital letters, "Learn to spell. The name's Fidel."
The Microsoft algorithm censored that, saying it did not conform to "Community Standards." Hmmm: no bullying or harassment, no fraud, deception, or attempt to steal, no sexual content, no profanity-- what standard in the world have I violated, I wondered. I tried the message again, in small print, in case the algorithm was merely programmed to disallow anything in capitals. Nope, it again rejected the six-word message.
And so, I responded to Microsoft: I have your "Microsoft Start Community Guidelines" firmly in mind, and I am as sure as a mere civilian on the internet can be that by this six-word message I have in no way violated any standards that a member of any putative community might erect as a guard against unpleasantness, sexuality, criminal behavior, or any other possible way to outrage or take advantage of any such member or members.
Now, especially within the last year, I have become more aware of the algorithms that "guard" social media, of which public-comment sections below news articles are a part-- Facebook is my example-- and of the clear absence of persons actually making such censoring decisions as this.
But I am compelled to declare that if there are actually any Microsoft employees policing and censoring public comment upon this or other publicly available reading material, those people are acting just as might be expected in an imperial dictatorship. Shame on you!
Of course, such persons will not permit this comment to be printed here. But I will engender healthy public discourse with it on several other information outlets I regularly use. If the algorithm never brings this comment, nor any other comment I ever make, to any other person's eyes here, well, eehhh, none the worse.
The flippant, unreconstructed-- and dare I say it, unpatriotic-- stupidity of this Mr. May's remark: "Who believes American intelligence? They're just girding up for war. They lie," clearly represents the unthinking response of tens of millions of low-info but voting American citizens to what might end up being World War Three, and is certainly a Hitlerian move by Vladimir Putin if he does not stop.
What makes my neck red, though (and I am an independent leftist, and a US military veteran of the Vietnam War), is that these people obviously believe that Mr. Putin is something other than a KGB-spawned, self-absorbed, lying, murderous, imperialist dictator obsessed with his perceived legacy as an historical "great Russian leader," and that what he says and does must therefore be assessed as more credible and rational than our own leaders.
Tucker Carlson is the most watched devolver of the Ukraine Crisis into a political tool to attack Joe Biden and the Democrats, clearly placing Republican victory in the midterm elections above his nation's efforts to avoid war but prepare for it. In this, I declare him (and he's not the only one) a traitor to the United States, no matter how he may wrap his campaign of disinformation targeted at our leaders in the coat of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
But whether anyone may have noticed, outright censorship as a method of dumbing mere, unmoneyed Americans down by decreasing their avenues for rational political discourse (and I include, in that discourse, voting) is gaining ground in this nation.
