Yesterday morning, Facebook took down all five of my posts, declaring each time that “We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn’t follow our Community Standards.”
Really? Here are the “radical” links I posted:
• Former Federal Election Commission Chair Brad Smith’s WaPo article on the Cohen plea.
• Commentator Don Surber’s Russian non-collusion article.
• Washington Times’ article on Limbaugh and our dual justice system.
• Reporter/author Salena Zito’s piece on Trump supporters’ reactions to the Manafort and Cohen news.
• Jack Posobiec’s tweet on Clinton/Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis representing a pro-Russian oligarch.
Many Facebook friends have had the same experience yesterday, with no explanations.
Each time I got the message, I clicked on the “This Isn’t Spam” response option. Facebook replied, saying they needed to review the article to confirm it met Facebook Community Standards. They then came back and, each time, said it did meet standards and would be reposted.
After which, Facebook deleted several of my newly-reposted articles.
But the bigger picture is much more grave than a few Facebook posts. [*Editor’s Note: Facebook later told the author of one of these articles, Salena Zito, that these actions were the result of a “bug.”]
There are escalating information asymmetries, enabled by technology companies.
Just last April, we learned the Chinese government is going to give its 1.4 billion citizens a “personal [social] score, based on how they behave.”
Leveraging a miniscule mix of Russian efforts before/after the 2016 election, Facebook announced it is mimicking China and assigning users a “trustworthiness score” to protect against fake news. Like my posts yesterday, Jim Brown expressing support for Trump, or Dennis Prager videos? Meanwhile, Facebook’s meddling on behalf of the 2012 Obama campaign overwhelms any 2016 Russian game-playing.
Google dropped its “Don’t be evil” motto in May as it prepares to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, after walking away in June from a US military contract. Google’s YouTube has also selectively censored people.
Twitter is shadow-banning conservatives, accelerating a “hate-speech” crackdown, and evaluating how to punish users for “off-platform” behaviors.
Shopify is purging gun-related retailers because a genuine commitment to free speech is “too idealistic.” Amazon just banned a gun book and appears to sell listening devices.
These illiberal behaviors drive home the inevitable outcome:
…Google, Facebook and Amazon can choke off freedom of speech at a moment’s notice, it’s not a question of whether speech on the internet will be censored, but when it will be censored and why.
The Left’s outsourcing of censorship to Silicon Valley technology companies leaves only one imperfect, time-sensitive solution—government-enforced deregulation—until there are more responsible leaders.
Trump has brought clarity to a pre-existing, deepening dividing line in America, angering the the corrupt statists currently in power. Zito:
…we…really only have two parties; the party of the governing elite [Democrats, GOPe, Deep State bureaucracy, MSM, and academia] and the party of Trump…
Surber notes that there is still no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. There is evidence of bureaucratic collusion and Clinton-Russia collusion that elites are covering up.
Rush Limbaugh comments how Americans see governing elites operating with impunity in a dual justice system (e.g., Cohen vs. Obama, Edwards; Manafort vs. Podesta) while “members of the media…[are]…casting…Mueller as a ‘sitting supreme branch of government who has the power to oversee the Trump administration’ on a daily basis.”
There is no chance for civic peace when a plurality of increasingly hard-left Democrats now favor socialism, don’t love America and have no empathy for Americans. They routinely undermine the rule of law, via illegal immigration, voter fraud, and sanctuary cities. They are silent about the escalating physical violence and harassment—555 examples at last count—toward Trump supporters.
With censorship, limited rights of conscience, violence, unequal justice, and a rogue governing elite, recent events confirm we have fully crossed the line from a voluntary civil society to a coercive political society. Our culture war is now fully out in the open and there is no middle ground. Take your stand.
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