How long?

Oregon Muse writes in the Ace of Spades blog,

"So it turns out that you can get banned from Facebook not only for saying bad things, but for being associated with people who say bad things. Facebook hates Gavin McGinnes, whom they've already banned, so they kicked out Alex Jones because he appeared in a video with him. Milo Yiannopolous got the boot for saying nice things about Tommy Robinson, whom Facebook has designated a 'hate figure'. So if someone says something nice about Alex Jones, will they be banned, too? This is all guilt by association, and my question is, if A appears in a video with B who once caught a ride with C who had lunch with D who once spoke at an auditorium where Milo once gave a speech, will that be enough to get A banned? Seriously, how long can these guilt chains get?

And I don't understand so-called conservatives like Ana Navarro applauding this. Does she honestly think they won't eventually come for her? 'Oh no, I'm not a h8r' I can hear her say. But it never seems to enter her pea brain that what constitutes 'hate speech' is going to get redefined, and then we'll see a new wave of bannings, and then redefined again, and again, until everyone who's even a *little* bit to her right has been de-platformed. And then what is she going to do? She is simply too dumb to see the endgame here. She may think there will be safety in running further and further left, but she obviously hasn't read her Solzhenitsyn. He saw that the gulags were full of men who considered themselves good communists and Party members and they kept writing letters to Comrade Stalin telling them that they've been imprisoned by mistake. So, a couple three years from now, someone is going to dig up some of Ana's old tweets or video clips where she expresses some tepidly conservative views, and that will be enough to toss her, kicking and squealing, off the platform. And nobody will defend her, because anyone who could or would defend her will have long been silenced."

Tribal taboo

Kevin Williamson writes in the New York Post,

...Facebook claims to be a neutral forum that does not discriminate politically but instead only imposes “community standards” that serve the interest of “safety.” That is, without question, a lie.

...Facebook’s executives are sometimes embarrassed by the way their product is used, and they are easy to shame into submission in the political monoculture of Silicon Valley. The BS about “safety” is pure pretext.

There is blood on the streets in Venezuela. But the Democratic Socialists of America are free to defend the Maduro regime on Facebook. Why? Because socialists don’t embarrass tech executives, but Alex Jones does.

...This is purely a matter of tribal taboo. And if progressives are celebrating for the moment, it is only because they believe, wrongly, they have won a victory over their adversaries — when what has happened is that they have helped to establish the norm that our public discourse is to be moderated by the social sensibilities of the Fortune 500’s chief executives and their boards of directors.

Laugh all you like at Alex Jones. He is a kook. But Facebook, and other online platforms, are not going to stop with him.

Read more here.

Blocked on Facebook!

Welcome brave readers. You have arrived at a blog site which has been blocked by Facebook! I wish I knew which blog post earned me that honor, but that would require honesty from the Facebook censors.

More censoring of Christians and conservatives by Facebook

In PJ Media, Tyler O'Neil reports that Facebook has banned the account of an human rights activist ten minutes after she posted this photo of ISIS members standing over 21 Christians who were then murderered by the ISIS killers. Facebook has long censored conservative and Christian voices on the platform. Christian sexuality scholar Robert Gagnon has experienced many temporary bans. The social media platform deleted PragerU videos and did not fire the staffer responsible. Facebook even blocked world-famous evangelist Franklin Graham on Christmas week — for a transgender-critical post from 2016. Christians have begun to fight back, calling for legal reform to make social media companies vulnerable to lawsuits.

Few such incidents seem as horrendous as the blacklisting of Faith McDonnell, a champion of human rights and the persecuted church.

Read the outrageous story here.

End of History

"
Have you watched Diamond and Silk videos? They are a kick! Facebook, however, found them to be "unsafe to the community!"

Ace of Spades adds,

After pleading their case on Fox and Friends this morning, this unappeable Social Justice Warrior decision is actually being reconsidered by FaceBook, FaceBook now says.

Facebook is reconsidering classifying videos produced by Diamond and Silk, two of President Donald Trump's most ardent supporters, as "unsafe to the community" after the dynamic duo went on Fox News' morning show asking why the embattled social media giant had labeled them as such.
In a statement to Fox News, a Facebook spokesperson said: "We are aware of this issue. We are reaching out to the creators of Diamond & Silk to try and resolve this matter."
I wonder if FaceBook is reconsidering this due to their appearance before Congress this week.

The left has decided that it is the End of History, and that all those who dissent with the identity politics left (with its officially approved and mandated racisms, sexisms, and genderisms) are to be eradicated, at least from the public square.

At least that much -- at first that much.

And meanwhile, the right's ahem intellectual leadership class whines only about their own prospects of working as token conservatives for the leftist machine.

Read more here.

Geller, Spencer challenge Facebook censors of free speech

Pamela Geller informs us today at Breitbart,

The American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) is filing a federal lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment. In a press release, he AFLC explained that “Section 230 provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge.” The lawsuit was brought on behalf of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Jihad Watch.

For years I have documented the outrageous bias of Facebook’s speech policies. Notoriously one-sided, those who oppose jihad terror, support Israel and stand against the most brutal and extreme ideology on the face of the earth (sharia) have been systematically blocked and banned. Just last month Facebook took down my page and blocked me after a devout Muslim opened fire on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Facebook said they took down my page because of their rule against “hateful, obscene, or threatening” content.

But it is not hateful, obscene, or threatening to oppose jihad terror such as we saw in Orlando. Truth is not hateful or obscene. What is hateful, obscene and threatening is that Facebook is moving to silence everyone who speaks honestly about the motivating ideology behind such attacks.

After the Orlando jihad massacre, they went into full damage control mode. Orlando showed jihad for what it is. They’re committed to obscuring that knowledge and making sure people remain ignorant and complacent about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.

...Why is Zuckerberg scrubbing evidence of Muslims inciting people to commit acts of hatred and violence? Why do his policies allow for vicious posts and pages against Israel to stand, but exposing the truth behind that Islamic hate is prohibited? That’s sharia.

Read more here.

A neutral pipeline for news? Hardly.

Illustration: Jim Cooke

Well, what do you know? Michael Nunez reports at Gizmodo,

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

...it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

...Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

...the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

...the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

An awesome kid!

A 12-year-old Georgia boy produced a video supporting Rudy Guiliani's criticisms of President Obama. His name is CJ Pearson. Facebook locked CJ's page, and he is not able to administer it. Here is the video:

On Facebook the Washington Examiner posts:

This is not the first time Facebook has blocked conservatives for questionable reasons. In March 2013, for example, Facebook banned Florida blogger Diane Sori for 30 days over something she never posted. As we have reported many times, Facebook has banned conservatives for clicking "like" or simply saying "thank you." Conservative pages have also been targeted and shut down for questionable reasons while other pages have been allowed to flourish. As we reported last May, articles mentioning Islam were falsely flagged as "unsafe" and pages critical of Islam have been removed over false claims of inappropriate material.

Thanks to Christopher Buckley