Politics

Facebook censors gospel song ‘What Would Heaven Look Like’ as Political

On Saturday, WND reported that Facebook, the social media giant once dubbed “Iron FistBook” by political cartoonist A.F. Branco, censored a video of the gospel song, “What Would Heaven Look Like,” claiming that it’s a political advertisement.

According to WND:

The Gospel music group Zion’s Joy! posted its new song “What Would Heaven Look Like,” a purely spiritual Christian praise song, to Facebook, boosting it with a $100 purchase – only to see the song censored for “political content.”

In a statement, a Facebook spokeswoman said that its political ad policy is “new, broad and exists to prevent election interference, so we’re asking people with content that falls under those rules to simply get authorized and show who paid for the ad in order for it to run.”

“Separately, we made an error by deleting the original post,” the statement continued. “As soon as we identified what happened, we restored the post since it does not violate our Community Standards and have apologized to Zion’s Joy.”

But as WND noted, these kinds of “errors” seem to happen far too often to Christians and conservatives on the platform.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has targeted Christians, as Rich Penkoski, pastor of the online ministry, “Warriors for Christ,” can testify.  As we reported here, Penkoski’s page has been repeatedly torn down over questionable claims even as LGBT activists have been allowed to issue threats against him, his family and volunteer staff with impunity.

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“The First Amendment, protecting free speech, freedom of religion and the free press, was predicated to protect, among other things, political speech. Yet, with near-monopoly control as the predominant social-media site in the world, Facebook is making some shockingly horrific calls,” WND said, observing that “subjects as innocuous as a cake recipe” has been flagged as political by the company Breitbart once called the “world’s most dangerous censor.”

As we reported here, the company also declared that a portion of the Declaration of Independence violated its rules on hate speech.

Facebook’s moderators issued this writer a 30-day ban over a picture of an eagle superimposed on a U.S. flag, and told one user her profile picture of a lilac tree was pornographic.

Recently, Facebook has clamped down hard on conservative sites while boosting more liberal outlets like CNN.  And despite criticism and concerns expressed by members of Congress, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there will be even more suppression on the site.

Content filtering will be the topic of yet another hearing in Congress, The Hill reported:

Top public policy officials from Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet’s YouTube division are set to testify before Congress on Tuesday to determine whether the companies were politically motivated in filtering content on their platforms.

GOP lawmakers have taken aim at the social media giants for what they have charged are politically biased practices in the content each site chooses to remove. The companies have denied such claims.

The companies will send their top public policy officials to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, including Facebook’s head of global policy, Monika Bickert; YouTube’s head of global public policy and government relations, Juniper Downs; and Twitter’s senior public policy strategist Nick Pickles, according to the committee.

As Jim Hoft noted, once upon a time, users of the site could decide or themselves what they wanted to see and read.  Now the site chooses for them.

“God help us,” he wrote.

We agree.

Incidents like this, by the way, were the inspiration for “Banned: How Facebook enables Militant Islamic Jihad,” written by yours truly with American-Israeli Adina Kutnicki.

Here’s video of the song Facebook thinks is political:

Related:

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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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