In the first half, whistleblower Ryan Hartwig discussed his time working as a content moderator on Facebook, with attorney and author Kent Heckenlively joining the conversation. Hartwig was hired by the subcontractor Cognizant to do content moderation of postings on Facebook both in Latin America and the United States. Over the time he worked for them (2018-2020), he concluded that Facebook had a slant toward censoring conservative or libertarian voices, and applied a double standard when squelching certain types of content. For instance, he said they asked him to remove a viral video of a Trump supporter being attacked. "Facebook kind of made up the rules as they went," he asserted, and he eventually realized how much power the social media company had. "They can really control the public discourse on the Internet," he stated.
Hartwig expressed concern that Facebook is not staying true to the 1996 Communication Decency Act, which calls for a true diversity of political discourse on the web. "I think what is happening," said Heckenlively, "is that social media giants are replacing a lot of the traditional media," and accordingly, he believes that the fairness in media doctrine should apply to the big players like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Hartwig noted that Facebook also chose sides in foreign countries like Venezuela, and asked moderators to eliminate any comments about revolution. In the next five years, Heckenlively predicted that companies like Google and Facebook will face serious competitors, and if they continue their path of restraining viewpoints, they could well lose their top dog positions.
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A nurse for 34 years, Lynn Monet purchased a home that turned out to be haunted. In the latter half, she revealed the horrors her family endured during her six-month ownership of the haunted home, located in East Flat Rock, North Carolina. While the house itself was not old (it was built in 1976), she concluded that it was traumatic events on the land or nearby that contributed to the demonic phenomena. In the home, "there were two demons and a young man that had hung himself," she said. While Monet was working on remodeling the house, she spent a few nights there with her children. When she went into the kitchen around 11:30 at night, she saw a dog-like apparition that shot down the hallway. It was hunched over and stood over five ft. tall. Her own dog reacted fearfully as though she was sensing something, Monet added.
When her son got up that morning, she saw purple bite marks on his leg. Later, when her friend Ellen was visiting her at the house, they heard a strange didgeridoo-type sound. Then, Ellen started screaming, thinking an insect was biting her. Monet pulled up the back of her shirt, "and she had a 4-inch claw mark on her back between her shoulder blades." The wound was fresh, just starting to welt. Some time later, she tried to have the house cleared by religious clergy, but they were unsuccessful, and her children were attacked. In her further investigations, she spoke with the earlier owner, who admitted that their children repeatedly talked about creepy invisible friends and had inexplicable scratches when they lived there.
News segment guests: John M. Curtis, Charles Coppes