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Hey gang, I know today is not a regularly scheduled episode. I wanted to jump in because I've been following different news stories and something's actually jumped out. Censorship and bookmarking. You see two places on your screen right now for those of you with video reminding you to like, share, subscribe and bookmark.

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Liking what we do, as you know, helps the algorithm on whatever platform that you're on and should get us noticed more easily. Sharing it does the same thing, but as you share it, it gets to the people who follow you more directly. By subscribing, in theory, you're notified when something like this comes live when it wasn't previously scheduled. It doesn't seem like any of those three are really working. I know you're going to hear me bitch about our own difficulties getting our material

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here in the Mastiff Media Network and particularly one up the middle, out to the public and to the masses. But I'm not the only one. Which is why we also recommend that you bookmark. And what we mean by bookmark is take the web address www.mastiff.media and save that so that when it does occur to you that the programming you've been trying to get in the social media accounts and the social media activity that you are trying to get isn't coming to you, you've got at least one place where you can still go get it. For us, that is www.mastiff.media.

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I know we don't need to use the www anymore, but .media isn't as common as .org, .com, .edu, .gov. And so there are people out there that we're trying to reach and we're also trying to educate that .media is an ending for web addresses. So eventually when they hear our company name, mastiff.media, they will recognize that it is also where they can find us. My friends in the Philadelphia market will remember Robin's 8th and Walnut, the jewelry store in South Philadelphia. That's their tagline. Our name is our address.

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And then you remember, Robin's Lawrence Park, Robin's Brew Mall, Robin's whatever other locations they have for their jewelry store, it is a part of that store's name. Companies are doing this on the web as well. Alex Sarmozzi's company, acquisition.com, is called acquisition.com. He always laughs when somebody says, well Alex, where can I find you? At my company? What's the name, what's the phone number, what's the email? Acquisition.com. That's the company. That's the website. That's where you can find me. Same thing goes with all of us here at Mastiff Media. Whether you're a direct employee or a contributor like Amber May, who I'm going to talk about

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during the show, David Beckmeyer, who I talk about all the time, and me. You can get us all by going to www.mastiff.media. Okay, so what's been happening? If you're just joining, my name is Yergs, Ross Yerger. I'm the voice that sounds like yours. The voice for radio. I'm told that I sound good, but I've got a face for radio too, something that should probably not be on video. But I say that I sound like yours because up the middle is a brand that I created that we say is politics for the rest of us.

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Amber is very much on the right of the political spectrum. She puts out really good information. In fact I just messaged her not long before going live today, creating this video, or audio version for those of you on podcasts or listening right now on the radio. She wrote a story about campaign finance. Being a conservative talking head in politics, she detailed where progressive agencies and non-profits and so on were supporting progressive candidates. She's going to make that sound bad. That's what talking heads on each side of the political spectrum do. Nevertheless, it was a fair article and I offered to repost it on the Mastiff.Media sub-stack and on our website.

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But what if you can't get our sub-stack or Twitter, or as is also the case recently, Instagram, Threads, Facebook and anything else put out by the company called Meta, originally founded if you've seen the movie The Social Network by Mark Zuckerberg, starting with Facebook or The Facebook as it used to be called and moving on from there. So imagine spending months organizing a political event, only to have the primary tool of communication, the platform of social media, your account only crashing on that day.

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It's happened twice this election, in fact twice this month, this month being October at the time of this recording, but we're also going to take a look at other times that it's happened in this particular cycle and to candidates or organizations who are only on the left of the political spectrum. The growing friction between political organizers and the automated moderation systems of these major social media platforms has been growing. Is it a series of unfortunate and coincidental technical glitches or a system failure, outright

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failure, that threatens the inspiration of civic participation? Or is it outright censorship? The No Kings Coalition happened two weeks ago, this weekend, today I believe actually. We're going to take a look at that and a string of similar takedowns across the political spectrum. We're going to take a look at Donald Trump on the right as well and then we're going to take a look at the explanations provided by big tech, not just Meta.

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Two weeks ago, the No Kings Coalition had their Instagram account. On the day of the global rally taken down, the organizers can now no longer reach in an immediate timeframe the participants that are actively following those accounts during the course of the rallies. Meta said that an automated security system mistakenly flagged the sudden surge in rally day engagement as malicious bot traffic. No Kings rejected the apology and the lingering backend lockout.

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In other words, once it was brought back online, the No Kings organizers still couldn't get to it. Again, this is during the actual rallies themselves, worldwide. They also demanded a former letter from Meta demanding accountability before this Tuesday's election. At least it would be an admission that something's going on. Well, is something else going on? This past week, right here in Florida, we have a very contentious race between Angie Nixon and her Republican incumbent, Ashley Moody, who has not been elected to the position.

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She was appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis when Senator Marco Rubio stepped down to become Donald Trump's current Secretary of State. So now for the first time in this position, between these two candidates, we're in the middle of having an actual election for the position. True to Florida's current status, Ashley Moody is holding a slight lead. Also I've said this before, I don't like the name Democratic Socialist Party of America, or using the word socialist at all. Because in the United States, it has too much of a reference to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. It has too much of a reference which exactly is what the right is using it for now, communism.

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Even though those of us who have looked into the party and their beliefs know that it has nothing to do with the communism that they're being accused of. The problem is voters on the right don't care. Many are not smart enough or willing to fact check, as we've been teaching right here on this show, the candidates on the right don't have the integrity to prohibit that misunderstanding. Late in October, Democratic Socialist candidate Angie Nixon and her hashtag Latinos Con Angie, the Instagram account during a get-out-the-vote push, was taken down for vague violations

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citing community standards before it was soon after restored. TikTok's permanent suspension of the promotional account for Alex Gibney's documentary about Elon Musk, allegedly for violating political content rules. Are you noticing a pattern, a smaller organization like No Kings, even though it's a global reach because they have literally not thousands of people, thousands of rallies on one day, with millions of people attending. Then we're getting bigger into a nationally recognized political candidate like Angie Nixon and while she may not be recognized nationally all over the country, her position

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is for a national level spot, the United States Senate, then the less than flattering documentary about Elon Musk, then other elections. President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, the left-leaning candidate in this past week's election in Brazil, META was ruled to have improperly restricted his content while artificially boosting the right-winged opponent who was supported by Donald Trump, who is being supported financially by META.

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I think we're at a point now where even people on the right have got to admit that this looks bad. In India, META's restriction of content from the World Hindu Congress, featuring a prominent Indian politician, was also acknowledged, citing vague local IT rules. So what does META say about all of these, what do we call them, they're not admitting to doing anything bad, so we can't call them violations on their part, even though I think that's kind of where we're at, about all of these incidents, the tech explanations

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versus intentional moderation, the glitch defense, they tried to explain how automated systems actually work and explain how tactics used by grassroots campaigns, rapid posting, mass tagging, digital swarms, trigger the exact same security tripwires designed to stop spam and foreign botnets, botnets are bot is short for robot, net is short for network, what attackers will do will create not just a bot, but a bunch of bots and target them towards opponents of whatever kind, this technology is geared to prevent that, however, their argument, META's argument, that this is a glitch, does not account for when all those tax or large amounts of activity are actually intended by the owner of the account, because

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it's their people communicating on the account. Contrast with intentional bans, contrast these automatic or automated glitches with deliberate executive little moderation decisions, such as in 2021, when META suspended Donald Trump following January 6th, here's something else I think we can all agree on, Donald Trump was not only suspended by META, Donald Trump was also suspended by the company now owned by his buddy, Twitter, once again we're back to talking about Elon Musk, but why was he suspended? Individual and independent fact

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checkers have tallied that in his first term alone, he lied or deliberately misled viewers and readers of his social media accounts more than 30,000 times, we've talked about that in the past, I think we calculated that to be at least 6 lies a day to reach that number, if we started as far back as the moment that he came down that golden escalator. In 2015, he was also suspended for his activity as it occurred on January 6th, you'll remember that at Mastiff Media and up the middle particularly, I do not call that day an insurrection, it

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was a coup, by the way Brazil with Bolsonaro, the right wing candidate and his father before him, seeing a pattern here, DJ TJ was accused of the very same thing, except in Brazil they called it what it was, a coup, not an insurrection, in fact it was a coup, it was a coup, it was actually less violent than January 6th, the point being I think the suspension of Donald Trump has justified, after all he doesn't own the platform, Twitter does, META does, the whole reason why he created Truth Social in the first place, so there's that, then

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there's the political demotion policy, META's 2024 algorithmic shift to stop proactively recommending any political content to users who don't explicitly follow it, their excuse for shadow banning us and how is it impacted political organizers universally, well how do we get the message out there if people are not actively looking for us particularly, that's why I ask you to share so people who follow you can at least be exposed to us and make that determination for themselves, it's also why I support Haven Social and our friend

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William Lavelle, who by the way has broken the $200,000 mark as of this broadcast and recording, in fact he's pushing $206,000, couldn't be happier to see this getting funded, so who holds the power in this, those on the left say that their concerns over the glitches are disproportionately impacting grassroots organizers who rely on these free platforms to mobilize voters and they are effectively silencing them at the worst possible moments, the no kings rally on game day, Angie Nixon on game day, the conservative perspective

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however brings out long standing accusations of the right wing profiles regarding shadow banning like we've experienced here as well, censorship, a lack of transparency in how Silicon Valley writes its algorithms, I don't know what the algorithm is, I just know that as of 2024 it doesn't like me, the universal problem is the danger of placing the modern public square in the hands of opaque automated artificial intelligence systems that make sweeping errors, accidental or otherwise, at scale, a line between algorithmic error and political suppression is increasingly blurry, especially if you check out Amber

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May's article about campaign financing and where that money comes from, we already know Mark Zuckerberg, Metta and so many of his Silicon Valley colleagues support Donald Trump who has not, since the previous incidents, experienced any of these glitches, is it because Metta is actually supporting him or maybe it's because his events aren't as big as what he says and they're not triggering that response, I'm not going to tell you either way what it is or what I think, that's for you to decide, on Tuesday, election day, if you haven't voiced your opinion already, what safeguards can campaigns put in place, well, read the

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ticker, read the one at the bottom, share, subscribe, bookmark, use multiple platforms or use a platform that you know is going to be safe, like Mastiff.media and Haven Social. Finally, do you believe these platforms are experiencing genuine technical errors or is this a feature of a system designed to suppress any or all or particular technical errors to suppress any or all or particular political noise? Let me know in the comments, let me

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know with an email, news, n-e-w-z, at yergs, y-e-r-g-z dot com, but whatever you do, like, share, bookmark, w-w-w dot Mastiff dot media, subscribe, use multiple platforms, use multiple platforms, bookmark, like, share, subscribe, do them all, so when we are taken down by somebody else, you won't be taken down and away from us. Whoever your preferred political commentator is, thanks for getting off the porch and running with the big dogs, have a safe and happy Halloween. Don't forget, tomorrow's up the middle, Sunday at its regular time, 6.30pm Eastern

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is my mid-term predictions and birthday show, tomorrow I turn 55. That's at 6.30pm Eastern right here and wherever on the Mastiff Media Network. Then weekdays is the Mastiff Media Morning Show, 6am to 9am Eastern, also on the Mastiff Media Network. Haven Social is a Kickstarter campaign going on right now, you can find that at havensocial.io or anywhere on the Mastiff.Media website. You can go to mastiff.media slash sponsors, it's on the homepage, it's in the advertising at the top and side, you'll find it and support that if it's something that you believe in. Bradley Schlegel, staff writer for Town & Country News, local news for local readers since 1899. Go to upvnews.com for more. Bill Repko's book, Homestretch, is available on Amazon and on

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his sub-stack. Links to both will be in the show notes and I think we're putting that on the website somewhere too, I don't know exactly where yet, but definitely check out both of them. And finally Mastiff.Media, run with the big dogs, go to mastiff.media slash join and get your content as part of the Mastiff.Media Network. Conservative, Progressive, LGBT, overall positive, news, sports, whatever it is, we'll take a look. This is up the middle, politics for the rest of us. I will see you tomorrow, 6.30pm Eastern for the birthday and midterm prediction show. Thanks for joining, stay positive, stay safe, Happy Halloween.