On Thursday, Patrick Howley, editor-in-chief at Big League Politics said that Facebook permanently deleted a major pro-Trump group. The group, “Donald J. Trump president of the United States,” had over 132,000 followers when it was removed, the report said. Worse yet, no reason was given, despite efforts by administrators.
Tea Party leader Lori Saxon, an administrator of the group, said she was presented with this dialog when she logged into Facebook:
According to Howley:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Saxon said the deletion is similar to other incidents in which she or her pages have been censored by Mark Zuckerberg’s platform.
“Gerry Emery had made me Admin of ‘Wake Up America’ too. I was blocked December 23-26 for calling the guys that harassed Ivanka on the plane S–m (Cu in the middle.) Joe Newby wrote articles about the flag incident. I’ve been blocked for 4 hours quite a few times since the big Deplorables & Libnorants & Deplorables” became active as groups, Saxon told Big League Politics.
“Facebook is not free speech unless you are a lib or killer,” Saxon added.
The incident Saxon refers to is last year’s ban based on an image of an eagle superimposed on a U.S. flag. According to Facebook, that image violated their standards, but the social media site never explained why. The ban was eventually lifted after multiple appeals, but that took some 20 days.
“They’ve been after that group,” group administrator Bob Lindamood told Big League Politics. “It was temporarily disabled 2 months ago, and then it’s already on the radar.”
“Anything with Tump, that’s game for them to look at with so-called fake news. I haven’t seen anything fake,” he added, noting that nothing in the group violated the site’s community standards.
“I support Trump. I like our president. It just sucks that Facebook deleted the whole group because it took me a long time to make it to 132,000 members. I really loved the group and my supporters,” said group creator Jesse Delcourt, who just got out of “Facebook jail,” adding that there were some spammers. He plans to create a new group, “in the hope that Facebook doesn’t delete it, they keep on deleting my stuff.”
This type of censorship is nothing new for the social media giant, as we’ve reported here time and again. The reason this happens, as Adina Kutnicki and I explained in our book, “Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad,” is that federal law allows it. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 has been interpreted to mean that social media sites can censor even constitutionally-protected speech with zero consequences. (To learn more, you’ll have to go here and buy the book…)
The bottom line is that until Congress addresses this, the beatings and censorship will continue.
Related:
- Facebook punishes user for complaining about death threat from Islamist
- Facebook yanks conservative page for post opposed to transgender agenda
- Facebook deems ‘Hunt & Kill All White Women’ not hate speech
- Facebook reports BBC journos to police for reporting child abuse images
- Facebook: Video of white man gagged, tortured, beaten bloody doesn’t violate community standards
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