Elizabeth Warren is accused of trying to 'circumvent the Constitution' by demanding Amazon stops promoting COVID books she says 'peddle misinformation about COVID'

Her authoritarian instincts come out again

Elizabeth Warren is calling on Amazon to suppress books sold on the site that she says include 'misinformation' about coronavirus.

'Given the seriousness of this issue, I ask that you perform an immediate review of Amazon's algorithms and, within 14 days, provide both a public report on the extent to which Amazon's algorithms are directing consumers to books and other products containing COVID-19 misinformation and a plan to modify these algorithms so that they no longer do so,' Warren wrote in a letter to Amazon's new CEO Andy Jassy last week.

The progressive Massachusetts senator detailed in the letter that she and her team conducted test searches on Amazon.com with coronavirus, pandemic and vaccine-related terms.

Warren said that the search resulted in some 'top results consistently included highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures.'

She specifically called out the book 'The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal' by Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins.

'Dr. Mercola,' Warren wrote in her letter, 'has been described as 'the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online.''

'Not only was this book the top result when searching either 'COVID-19' or 'vaccine' in the categories of 'All Departments' and 'Books'; it was tagged as a 'Best Seller' by Amazon and the '#1 Best Seller' in the 'Political Freedom' category,' the senator lamented.

Mercola accused Warren of 'censorship', and claimed it is illegal for lawmakers to pressure private entities to stifle freedom of speech.

'Senator censorship?' the doctor and author wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday. 'Warren pushes Amazon to burn my best selling book with 5 star reviews. It is illegal for public officials to pressure private businesses to censor anyone in the USA!'

In a tweet Monday, Warren defended herself against criticism for her call on banning books from Amazon.

'We're in a critical moment in the fight against COVID-19, and Amazon is spreading dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and treatment. Amazon must review its online algorithms and take aggressive action to stamp out COVID-19 misinformation,' the senator posted.

Her call on Amazon to stifle books, however, has conservatives worried about continued suppression of right-leaning voices by tech companies. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Warren just wants Amazon to 'ban books that she disagrees with.'

'Here you have a self-described liberal, who is a law professor at our premiere law school, calling for book burning. Did you think you'd live to see that?' Carlson said on his show Monday night.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9989339/Elizabeth-Warren-demands-Amazon-stop-promoting-books-COVID-misinformation.html

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Facebook exempts secret 'whitelisted' elite from its rules and allows them to post banned content with special XCheck program

Facebook has a secret program in place that allows celebrities and powerful people to skirt the social network’s own rules, according to a bombshell report.

The Silicon Valley giant’s program, called ‘XCheck’ or ‘cross check,’ created a so-called ‘whitelist’ of celebrities who are immune from enforcement, according to The Wall Street Journal.

It was initially designed to protect the company from bad publicity in the event that it moderated content from some of the more high-profile users. Instead, critics say that it has shielded those same users from the rules that apply to the general public.

The list of protected celebrities and VIPs include Brazilian soccer star Neymar; former President Donald Trump; his son, Donald Trump Jr; Senator Elizabeth Warren; model Sunnaya Nash; and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself.

In 2019, a live-streamed employee Q&A with Zuckerberg himself was suppressed after Facebook's algorithm mistakenly ruled that it violated the company's guidelines.

Movie stars, cable talk show hosts, academics, online personalities, and anyone who has a large following is protected by 'XCheck' on both Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram. As of last year, there were 5.8 million Facebook users covered by 'XCheck.'

The program has been in place for years - well before Trump was banned from the platform after he was accused of fomenting the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

The Journal relied on internal documents provided to it by employees of the company who say that the program shields celebrities from enforcement actions that are meted out against the platform’s more than 3 billion other users.

If a VIP is believed to have violated the rules, their posts aren’t removed immediately but are instead sent to a separate system staffed by better-trained employees who then further review the content.

‘XCheck’ allowed international soccer star Neymar to post nude photos of a woman who had accused him of rape in 2019. The images were deleted by Facebook after a whole day, allowing them to be seen by Neymar’s tens of millions of his followers.

A spokesperson for Facebook told the Journal that the program 'was designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.'

An internal review found that even when Facebook does take action against protected accounts, it does so belatedly.

Last year, 'XCheck' allowed posts that violated Facebook guidelines to be viewed at least 16.4 billion times before they were finally removed, according to a document obtained by the Journal.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9986225/Facebook-exempts-secret-whitelisted-elite-rules-allows-post-banned-content.html

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