Fb notified me on Sunday morning that eight years in the past, I posted a hyperlink to my Washington Occasions article warning of Dictatorial Democracy no matter whether or not Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump gained the 2016 election. The opening sentence set the tone: “The 2016 election campaign is mortifying millions of Americans in part because the presidency has become far more dangerous in recent times.” Fb all the time offers customers the choice to “Share a Memory” hyperlink. I tapped the button to robotically ship a discover on “Dictatorial Democracy” to all my Fb mates and followers. No such luck: Fb notified me that that they had banned sharing the piece as a result of it violated Fb “Community Standards.”
Perhaps if I had merely howled about one of many present presidential candidates being Hitler, that may have glad Fb‘s Community Standards?
Facebook chief Zuckerberg recently admitted that his company massively censored Americans at federal command during covid and other times. Is suppressing any mention of dictatorship a policy designed to placate federal overseers? Or are Facebook‘s Community Standards guardians really as dumb as Tim Walz? Why was mentioning “dictatorial democracy” acceptable in 2016 but forbidden in 2024?
After Facebook blocked my repost of the Dictatorial Democracy piece, I posted the above photo mocking their decision. Facebook banned the photo, too. Facebook permitted me to request a review of that ban. The response offered a multiple choice menu of protests. I was disappointed there was not a “You people are boneheads” option. Their “review” process seemed as vapid as their original decree:
And how does the process work? Facebook‘s AI software checks to confirm the initial decision by Facebook AI to ban a post.
I sit on the edge of my chair, awaiting the verdict from Facebook software.
Actually, I thrashed Facebook seven years ago in USA Today for suppressing a post I did about FBI atrocities at Waco, Texas in 1993. That piece noted the Waco fire image was not the first time that Facebook erased an iconic image that the U.S. government would be happy to see vanish. Facebook likely deleted thousands of postings of the 1972 photo of a young South Vietnamese girl running naked after a plane dropped napalm on her village. After coming under severe criticism last year, Facebook announced that it would no longer suppress that image. But Facebook was already shamelessly craven to foreign governments, including Germany, Turkey, Pakistan, and India. I warned that Facebook’s “nonchalance about engaging in the electronic equivalent of book burning abroad” signaled that the corporate might do the identical right here.
Truly, the Dictatorial Democracy ban may not be essentially the most inane ruling I’ve seen from Fb this 12 months. In June, they blocked my posting a hyperlink to a Way forward for Freedom Basis podcast as a result of it contained the duvet picture of my new e-book, Final Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. Fb claimed my put up violated “community standards” as a result of it was spam. How might or not it’s spam if it was clearly labeled and together with a video and hyperlink from a good group—nicely, no less than respected to libertarians, anarchists, and hooligans?
Fb notified me that I might attraction their ruling. High quality—I can clarify their blunder in three sentences. No such choice. As a substitute, they supplied a sequence of pages the place I might verify a field that appeared prefer it was designed for kindergarten. “It’s not offensive in my region”—ya, that‘s a great option to sway the Facebook Content Moderation Police in Manila. I am pretty sure that the Facebook Appellate Division never sent me their verdict on this content.
Looking at that strikedown of my book cover, I wondered: Has Facebook gone full Idiocracy?
Or maybe that already happened during covid? Facebook placated the Biden White House by promising to delete any posts or comments that suggested “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”—even though federal agencies now admit that the virus likely came out of a US government-funded lab in Wuhan. On March 21, 2021, White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty notified Facebook that suppressing false information on COVID was not enough. A Facebook official assured the White House that Facebook was also suppressing “often-true content” that might discourage people from getting vaccinated. White House officials even ordered Facebook to delete humorous memes, including a parody of a future television ad: “Did you or a loved one take the COVID vaccine? You may be entitled…” President Biden denounced Facebook for killing people because it did not mindlessly repeat the Party Line on covid. In June 2023, Zuckerberg admitted that the feds “asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. That stuff…really undermines trust.”
A few weeks after Zuckerberg‘s comment, Federal Judge Terry Doughty ruled that the White House and federal agencies “engaged in coercion of social media companies to such extent that the decisions of the social media companies should be deemed that of the Government.” Doughty slammed the Biden administration for committing potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”
Unfortunately, condemnations of federal censorship by federal judges apparently did nothing to put starch into Facebook‘s spine. Or maybe Facebook would massively censor its users even if it didn’t anticipate any rewards from Washington?
On August 27, Zuckerberg despatched a letter to a congressional committee stating that “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Fb to censor content material. Zuckerberg regretted that his firm cowered, kind of: “I regret that we were not more outspoken about it…. We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.” However Zuck promised that Fb would “not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration” sooner or later.
So we must always belief that Fb is not going to once more grow to be a prepared executioner of People‘ freedom of speech, apart from any references to “dictator” that may discomfit folks. My 2016 piece declared, “The United States may be on the verge of the biggest legitimacy crisis since the Civil War.” That legitimacy disaster has worsened over the previous two presidential phrases.
However no less than Fb can be right here to guarantee we by no means run out of cute kitty pictures.