This is Toby Sumpter with your CrossPolitic Daily News Brief for Friday, December 4, 2020.
If you have a news story you think we might need to cover, please send articles and links to news at crosspolitic dot com.
Facebook Privileges Some Hate Speech Over Other Hate Speech
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/facebook-hate-speech/
Washington Post Reports: Facebook is embarking on a major overhaul of its algorithms that detect hate speech, according to internal documents, reversing years of so-called “race-blind” practices.
Those practices resulted in the company being more vigilant about removing slurs lobbed against White users while flagging and deleting innocuous posts by people of color on the platform.
The overhaul, which is known as the WoW Project and is in its early stages, involves re-engineering Facebook’s automated moderation systems to get better at detecting and automatically deleting hateful language that is considered “the worst of the worst,” according to internal documents describing the project obtained by The Washington Post. The “worst of the worst” includes slurs directed at Blacks, Muslims, people of more than one race, the LGBTQ community and Jews, according to the documents.
As one way to assess severity, Facebook assigned different types of attacks numerical scores weighted based on their perceived harm. For example, the company’s systems would now place a higher priority on automatically removing statements such as “Gay people are disgusting” than “Men are pigs.”
Facebook has long banned hate speech — defined as violent or dehumanizing speech — based on race, gender, sexuality and other protected characteristics. It owns Instagram and has the same hate speech policies there. But before the overhaul, the company’s algorithms and policies did not make a distinction between groups that were more likely to be targets of hate speech versus those that have not been historically marginalized. Comments like “White people are stupid” were treated the same as anti-Semitic or racist slurs.
In the first phase of the project, which was announced internally to a small group in October, engineers said they had changed the company’s systems to deprioritize policing contemptuous comments about “Whites,” “men” and “Americans.” Facebook still considers such attacks to be hate speech, and users can still report it to the company. However, the company’s technology now treats them as “low-sensitivity” — or less likely to be harmful — so that they are no longer automatically deleted by the company’s algorithms. That means roughly 10,000 fewer posts are now being deleted each day, according to the documents.
Trump Spoke on Wednesday Evening December 2, 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP0ixjE7JIU
Play Audio 0:00-2:12
Folks, do you wish You could listen and watch the news any time day or night from a source that was committed to telling the truth about what’s going on in the world and have a no-holds barred biblical analysis to accompany it? You tired of woke scolds and latte theologians nuancing everything to death. Do you wish Christian media was a little bit more rowdy and more idols got smashed? That’s what CrossPolitic is all about. And we need your help to continue growing the Fight Laugh Feast Network. The best way you can help is by becoming a Fight Laugh Feast club member today. Many of you already have, and it has allowed us to grow so much already, but if you’re tired of legacy media cramming their pagan worldviews down your throat and social media censoring views they don’t approve of, support CrossPolitic as we build a Christian Media Platform and Network committed to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Also, we like to laugh and drink beer. Support Rowdy Christian Media and become a fight laugh feast club member today. Go to Fightlaughfeast.com.
Kevin McCullough Claims to Have Proof That the Dominion Voting Machine Company was Purchased by China in October
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLUKeNIAIys
Play Audio: 0:47-1:04, 2:23-4:22
This comes just a few days after the CEO of Dominion Voting Systems, John Poulos wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal explicitly denying any such business
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fake-claims-about-dominion-voting-systems-do-real-damage-11606755399
Poulos writes: The allegations against Dominion are bizarre, but I’ll set the record straight.
Dominion is an American company, now headquartered in Denver. Dominion is not and has never been a front for communists. It has no ties to Hugo Chávez, the late dictator of Venezuela. It has never been involved in Venezuelan elections. None of Dominion’s systems use the Smartmatic software that has come under attack, as any state certification lab could verify.
There is no secret “vote flipping” algorithm. Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. States replicate this process for their own certifications. Postelection canvassing and auditing also exist to provide additional assurance of the vote totals’ accuracy.
The part of the election process on which Dominion focuses is highly regulated and certified. The company doesn’t work in noncertified areas such as voter-registration systems, poll books or signature-verification software, and it doesn’t provide vote-by-mail printing. Dominion voting machines do one thing: accurately tabulate votes from county-verified voters using a durable paper ballot controlled and secured by local elections officials.
Some of the main counties where results have been contested, like Philadelphia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh), don’t even use Dominion voting systems. In fact, across the 14 Pennsylvania counties that use Dominion systems, President Trump received 52.2% of the vote.
… Dominion is never able to affect the outcome of an election. The entire certification process makes sure of that… Dominion’s customers are election officials from both parties in the 28 states where it operates.
Unlike its critics, Dominion has had to attest to every part of its business ownership and operations to governmental agencies and in courts—under oath and penalty of perjury.
But isn’t that what all those affidavits from eye witnesses are attempting to do? And what about all the voting inspectors who claim they were not allowed close enough access to the vote processing to do their jobs?
… These attacks undermine the tens of thousands of state and local officials who run our elections. When it comes to counting ballots, officials have established a distributed, multilayered system with checks and balances, in which robust safeguards ensure that no one needs to trust blindly any person, company or technology. Here are some of the safeguards in place in Georgia, where the Trump campaign has contested the result:
- Tabulation machines are tested publicly, before bipartisan witnesses, before and right after Election Day.
On Election Day, poll workers—not Dominion systems—verify voters’ identities, including a signature check.
- Voters mark a paper ballot to vote. Absentee voters use pens, while in-person voters use “ballot marking devices,” which display a digital ballot for voters to make a selection and then print a paper record. In both cases, voters verify the marked paper ballot before casting it in a secure ballot box through an air-gapped scanning tabulator.
- After polls close, results are tallied by local officials. Paper ballots are safeguarded by thousands of poll workers distributed across 2,656 precincts.
- The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office certified election results after hand-auditing five million ballots, which showed that the paper-ballot voting system counted and reported results accurately. The small change to the final tally was due entirely to the addition of ballots that had been uncounted due to human process errors.
The state also enlisted Pro V&V, a certified third-party testing laboratory, to audit a random sample of Dominion machines. No tampering was found.
The wild allegations of recent weeks have fueled the harassment of election officials and Dominion employees across the country—including stalking and death threats. The lies and smears have no basis in fact, but they do real damage to our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process. The false allegations should be retracted immediately.
Citizens should know that America’s rigorous, layered and transparent electoral process—in which Dominion is proud to participate—ensures its elections are secure, accurate and credible.
So either Dominion is owned by China as part of an effort by Hugo Chavez to swing American elections and the CEO of Dominion is lying his head off. Or else, Kevin McCullough is lying his head off, or at least very, very mistaken.
Christians should care about the truth. We should not be naively taken in by mass media or naively taken in by conspiracies, mobs on the left of mobs on the right. But if we are Christians, we love the truth, and we want the truth to known.
The reason we have this kind of confusion and deception filling our land is because we are a people who have put up with and embraced lies for decades. We have put up with the lie that the government can vote to steal our neighbors land and income if the majority votes for that tax hike. We have put up with the lie that the Supreme Court can mandate the murder of the unborn in our states. We have put up with the lie that what two dudes do in the privacy of their own room doesn’t affect me and my family. But perhaps most insidiously, we have put up with lies in the church. We have pastors and elders with rebellious children, and we have lied to the world about what God says qualifies a man for office. We have put up with soft, limp-wristed preachers who mince their words and preach on the sins of the people across the street rather than insisting that we have a godly man tell us what our sins are and require us to repent in the fear of God. Until the Christian Church quits putting up with lies, our country will continue following our example to the tee.
This is Toby Sumpter with Crosspolitic News. You can find this and all of our shows at Crosspolitic.com or on our app, which you can download at your favorite app store, just search “Fight Laugh Feast”. Also, if you want to rock your Fight Laugh Feast bona fides visit rowdychristian.com for shirts, hats, hoodies, postmill coffee, etc. Also: did you hear we started a new magazine? Four issues a year for forty bucks. https://flfnetwork.com/product/fight-laugh-feast-magazine/
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