Facebook Censors Gone Wild

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg recently lamented how his company groveled to federal demands to censor any criticism of the Biden administration’s Covid policy

By James Bovard

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg recently lamented how his company groveled to federal demands to censor any criticism of the Biden administration’s Covid policy. But is Facebook really launching a “Brave New World” era of free speech?

Facebook notified me on Sunday morning that eight years ago, I posted a link to my Washington Times article warning of Dictatorial Democracy regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump won 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.” Facebook always gives users the option to “share” a “Memory” link. I tapped the button to automatically send a notice on “Dictatorial Democracy” to all my Facebook friends and followers. No such luck: Facebook notified me that they had banned sharing the piece because it violated Facebook “Community Standards.”

Maybe if I had simply howled about one of the current presidential candidates being Hitler, that would have satisfied Facebook’s Community Standards?

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 A.I. software checks to confirm the initial decision by Facebook A.I. 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 US 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 company could do the same here.

Actually, the Dictatorial Democracy ban might not be the most inane ruling I have seen from Facebook this year. In June, they blocked my posting a link to a Future of Freedom Foundation podcast because it contained the cover image of my new book, Last Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. Facebook claimed my post violated “community standards” because it was spam. How could it be spam if it was clearly labeled and included a video and link from a reputable organization – well, at least reputable to libertarians, anarchists, and hooligans?

Facebook notified me that I could appeal their ruling. Fine – I can explain their blunder in three sentences. No such option. Instead, they offered a series of pages where I could check a box that looked like 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, Mark 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 an 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 expect any rewards from Washington?

On August 27, Zuckerberg sent a letter to a Congressional committee stating that “senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor content. Zuckerberg regretted that his company cowered, more or less: “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.” But Zuck promised that Facebook would “not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration” in the future.

So we should trust that Facebook will not again become a willing executioner of Americans’ freedom of speech, except for any references to “dictator” that might discomfit people? My 2016 piece declared, “The United States may be on the verge of the biggest legitimacy crisis since the Civil War.” That legitimacy crisis has worsened over the past two presidential terms.

The demolition of free speech by social media companies such as Facebook is compounding the loss of trust in American institutions. If it is no longer safe to mention the word “dictator” regarding presidential candidates, the First Amendment will be worth less than the most noxious campaign promise.

But at least Facebook will always have plenty of cute kitty photos.

An earlier version of this piece was posted by the Mises Institute.

Sourced from Brownstone Institute

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James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of ten books, including Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.

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