Politics

Breitbart: Facebook now ‘the world’s most dangerous censor’

censored2An article posted to Breitbart.com on Tuesday by Allum Bokhari minced no words comparing Facebook to the former East German secret police, calling it the “world’s most dangerous censor.”

“A friend of mine whose parents grew up in East Germany once told me that the Stasi would have loved Facebook,” Bokhari wrote. “’Millions of people voluntarily offering up their personal lives, their addresses, their photos,’ she said. ‘The Stasi had to force people to do that!’”

Bokhari continued:  “She didn’t have a Facebook account. But over a billion people around the world do — and that makes the social network a tempting target for authoritarian regimes, who either want to monitor or control the speech of their citizens. But who could have predicted that the most authoritarian of them all would, once again, be Germany?”

Bokhari observed that the level of censorship now being seen on Facebook — the world’s largest social media site — is “unprecedented.”

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“The future is here: not the one envisaged by Gene Roddenberry, but by George Orwell,” Bokhari added.

This, of course, is nothing new to those of us who have documented Facebook’s slide into Orwellian tyranny for years.  What is new, however, is that more media outlets are finally beginning to report the phenomenon.

An article posted on the same day at the UK Mirror said that Facebook’s latest initiative to stamp out speech it doesn’t like in Europe could have unintended, and undesirable, consequences:

If Zuckerberg wants to make sure we can’t see ISIS videos showing people being burned alive or beheaded, then there’s no question that the initiative is a good one.

But if the result is that Europeans can’t discuss the very real – and sometimes scary – changes taking place on the continent, then the plans are simply unacceptable.

Clearly, we should all be interested in creating a society without hate and xenophobia.

Yet silencing people will only send negative sentiments into the underground, where they will fester and rot into an even more disgusting form.

Moreover, Jasper Hamill said, Facebook’s actions are already taking their toll.

“Facebook is already have a sterilising effect on public discourse as people tend to only share content or sentiments which make them look good – behaviour known as “virtue signalling,” he said.

But as this writer and others have documented repeatedly, this censorship has been going on for quite some time – at least since 2012 and according to some, since 2010.   And, as we have reported, not just over Islamic terrorism.  Some have been slapped for simply saying “thank you,” and one user was told her profile picture, which was of a lilac tree, was “pornographic.”

Facebook even banned Fox News’ Todd Starnes for a short period over a post supporting the NRA, Paula Deen and Jesus Christ.  Last year, Facebook told one user that a profile picture promoting traditional marriage violates their community standards and one page owner said his page was yanked after Facebook claimed his picture of the Marine Corps emblem also violated their nebulous standards.

In May 2014, Dave Gaubatz, author of “Muslim Mafia” and a specialist in counterterrorism, said he was told that Muslim groups are working with Facebook to remove accounts of those critical of Islam.  Shortly after that report was released, Facebook responded by falsely flagging that article and others mentioning Islam as “unsafe.”

Recently, Faye Higbee noted that yours truly was repeatedly banned over forged posts — all of which dealt with Islam.  Others have also been banned for the very same posts, made to look as though they created them.

There are many, many more stories like these documenting Facebook’s actions — you can review them for yourself here and here.

While we hate to see reports of Gestapo-like censorship on a medium originally intended to foster free and open discussion, we are glad that media outlets like Breitbart and the Mirror are finally noticing what we’ve been documenting for years.

Welcome to the party.

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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