Why is Facebook Targeting Conservative History-based Sites?
Donald Trump, Jr. took Facebook to task in a recent article, and the censorship may be worse than even he thought
Legal Insurrection readers are acutely aware of the deplatforming and silencing of conservative voices across social media and via outlets like Amazon.
The latest victim to get slammed by the iron-hand of Big Tech is President Trump’s chief social media guru, Dan Scavino. Facebook blocked his account for simply responding to a question from a reader.
The excuse was that his remark seemed like spam.
Scavino is responsible for several of the president’s and White House’s social media accounts. He has been with the president for years.
His accounts have a tremendous following, so a block on Facebook has a big reach. Already there are over 750 comments on his page, including:
“Cory Critser Dan Scavino Daniel Scavino Jr. … I think it’s time for some Senate hearings with Facebook on there attempts to influence the election.”
On a smaller scale, my personal website (Temple of Mut) was temporarily blocked from being linked in Facebook. The reason I was given: The website did not meet community standards.
True . . . if your community consists merely of climate-change cultists and gender justice warriors. However, Facebook is supposed to be playing by the rules of a platform and not a publisher, so my science-based and news-focused content should be acceptable under any reasonable standard.
Additionally, the Canto Talk Show program that I help host on occasion was also hit with a Facebook ban. Silvio Canto, the mild-mannered, thoughtful host and author of historic, sports, and political analysis was deeply troubled when his show promotion posts were deemed “inappropriate.”
I am very angry. It took me several hours to calm down. They banned posts on World War II and baseball. What is offensive about that. Was it because I actually called Hitler “Hitler” instead of Trump? And my baseball piece was about Hank Aaron. How is that not appropriate? [transcript provided by author]
Barry Jacobson, a former Green Beret who fought to defend the Constitution (including his First Amendment rights), was also impacted by Facebook censorship. The social media giant recently stopped the promotion of his military history podcasts.
That Facebook deems discussion of WW-2 “in violation of community standards” is not only astonishing; it begs the question, what standard are they upholding? Ignorance? Put another way, is the banning of all discussion of the horrors caused by the Nazis somehow going to further the cause (which I assume Facebook supports) of hindering the spread of Nazi ideology?
I suspect that Facebook has tweaked its algorithms in such a way that anything even mildly conservative is now flagged. Donald Trump, Jr. recently published a detailed piece decrying Big Tech’s censorship of conservatives, which has steadily become more flagrant and overt.
Facebook appears to have deliberately tailored its algorithm to recognize the syntax and style popular among conservatives in order to “deboost” that content. “Mainstream media,” “SJW” (Social Justice Warrior) and “red pill” — all terms that conservatives often use to express themselves — were listed as red flags, according to the former Facebook insider.
Facebook engineers even cited BlazeTV host Lauren Chen’s video criticizing the social justice movement as an example of the kind of “red pills” that users just aren’t allowed to drop anymore. Mainstream conservative content was strangled in real time, yet fringe leftists such as the Young Turks enjoy free rein on the social media platform.
I would argue that the situation is even worse than the president’s son has stated if history-based blogs are now being silenced.
For those of you interested, listen to this Canto Talk podcast reviewing the current status of the Battle against Big Tech.
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Comments
Those who do not study Real History
are Doomed to be Slaves………..
The progs and leftist morons do not understand it is not Race, Sex, or anything except Americanism v Communism. We do not subscribe to Social Justice. Sorry about that.
Or be forced into Islam, do or die.
Why? BECAUSE THEY CAN.
They have faced ABSOLUTELY ZERO CONSEQUENCES for doing it so far. They’re getting bolder.
And they will continue until Congress FINALLY acts and revokes their publisher protections. At this point that is the only thing that MIGHT rein them in.
Regulations should be one path to correct this, another is competition. Conservatives need to either embrace existing neutral platforms or create commercial or non profit ones as an alternative to facebook, twitter, etc.
They probably wouldn’t be so aggressive if the House wasn’t controlled by the Democrats. They know that no legislation can be passed that affects them.
“Publisher protections”? Just using that term shows you have no idea what you’re talking about. Publishers are not protected. Publishers are responsible for everything they publish, regardless of who actually wrote it, because they exercise editorial control and choose what to publish and what not to. Section 230 of the CDA provides that interactive computer services (such as LI’s comment section that we are using right now) can delete user-provided content without thereby becoming publishers. Facebook is doing just that.
And anyone who tells you there was an expectation of political neutrality is just lying to you. LI’s moderators are not required to be politically neutral, and neither are Facebook’s. Neither can reasonably be held liable for content they don’t delete, because it’s impossible to moderate everything.
Repealing section 230 and making moderated forums into publishers would force all online forums to shut down. It really is as simple as that.
Milhouse is lying deliberately.
The plain language is that they are only entitled to exemption from liability as a common carrier. A common carrier is like a train, or an oil pipeline, or the phone company. It carries the content of everyone that wants to use it, without alteration. Censorship is alteration by definition.
Once they alter, they are a publisher.
You are lying. The law explicitly says the exact opposite of what you say. You are not entitled to your own facts.
Big Tech is aiding, considerably, to persons having a malformed mind, one prone to needing safe places. Moreover, such individuals seem to suffer no embarrassment at broadcasting how weak and ineffectual they are in meeting the challenges of just being alive. Our nation is all the mediocre and weak because of this.
President Trump: Enforce the law:
The Antitrust Laws:
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/antitrust-laws
A government solution will not work here. You want Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer types regulating internet companies? I’m positive that you would not like the result.
Not regulate them: but bust them up. Like the oil companies.
Google has NO competition. Nor does Facebook. Nor does Amazon.
Standard Oil was busted up out of sheer envy and evil hatred. That is not an example you should cite.
Roosevelt did not favor breaking up of the oil companies: he preferred just to stop their anti-competitive abuses.
If you don’t like the busting up oil, how about the busting up of the Northern Securities Company?
Google, Facebook and Amazon must be divided.
There were no “anti-competitive abuses”. The “progressives” simply hated Rockefeller because he was so rich and they burned with envy and wanted to tear him down.
The reason conservatives are losing this fight is that virtually everyone on our side seems to be congenitally retarded.
Google has NO competition. Nor does Facebook. Nor does Amazon.
This is so transparently false and trivially disprovable I’m not even going to waste time on it. What you really mean is “I’m too stupid to figure out the Internet, so Big Daddy Government should force companies to do what I want”.
All communication avenues controlled by the leftoids are traps. And everybody is falling for it. They can pull the plug at any time and there’s nothing you do about it afterwards.
Treat social media sites like other communication technology companies that only have value and utility because of networking. For example, a single phone is fairly useless, it gains utility as more and more people buy into the network with their own phones. At some point it becomes an essential tool for users, and denying access to users based on non-criminal behavior is and should be a crime itself.
Ideally, SM networking sites that are publicly traded companies – as opposed to hobby sites – should be required to have clear and concise non-subjective rules on required behavior to maintain access. Reduced access should be done openly – no shadow-banning – and at least one level of appeal should be available.
“At some point it becomes an essential tool for users, and denying access to users based on non-criminal behavior is and should be a crime itself.”
I disagree that this problem requires more laws or bigger government. The solution is simple. As of right now, facebook and twitter and the like are treated as Public Forums and are granted special protections from civil and criminal liabilities.
When these companies begin curating content on their sites by censoring legal speech, they become Publishers of content and lose the protections afforded to Public Forums.
They become responsible for everything that goes across their services. Every illegal act that is somehow facilitated by facebook, think organizing a flash mob or incitement, even if later taken down by FB, can be viewed as FB aiding and abetting that crime. Same goes on the civil side, breeches of contract, tortious interference, etc.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that there is an army of hungry lawyers dying to start taking shots at FB, they have very deep pockets. Let the lawfare commence.
@dawg To make it happen does it need to be a law or executive order. If executive order than what isTrump waiting for.
No, they are not. A public forum is a government-owned space where it is restricted in what limits it can put on speech. In a limited public forum its regulations must be viewpoint-neutral but need not be content-neutral; in a full public forum they must be content-neutral as well. None of this has any relationship to private spaces such as Facebook (except government-run accounts; FB can still censor those, but the government can’t).
FB, Twitter, and the like are interactive computer services. That doesn’t give them “special privileges”; it just gives them the appropriate legal standing for that kind of service.
This explicitly contradicts the law. The whole point of Section 230 of the CDA is that they do not become publishers, because of course they shouldn’t be. The law was passed in reaction to the AOL case, which if left to stand would have strangled the whole concept of online forums at birth. And again, public forums have nothing to do with this.
You oversimplified it.
See:
Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins 447 U.S.74 (1980), free speech at the shopping mall. Held:
(1) under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers; and
(2) under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights in their constitutions than under the federal Constitution, so long as those rights do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights.
Facebook can be held to account.
It’s a bad decision. Forcing a property owner to allow his premises to be used for speech he disagrees with does infringe his federal constitutional rights.
No, again, they are treated as “common carriers”. Your deliberate false classification is not the legal term they operate under.
You are lying. The classification is “interactive computer service”, and the law explicitly allows them to delete user content they find offensive without thereby becoming publishers.
Remember when Net Neutrality was a big issue on the left? How big tech companies would step in and restrict content and how that was a bad thing to leftists?
Yeah, me neither.
Net Neutrality was about shared cost a la Obamacare’s shared responsibility but for high bandwidth products (e.g. Google, Amazons, Netflix, etc.).
They are ‘manufacturing’ more Trump Voters every day.
The better question is why are conservatives using Facebook, thus supporting their enemy financially?
Same reason they vote for the likes of McCain, or mcconnell or ryan.
Now that this is all apparent, Zuckerberg is out there whining that he wants government rules because it’s not up to a private company to regulate these kinds of things. For all his money and technical aptitude, he’s an idiot.
Zuckerberg wants government rules because that would lock in his market share.
No one would be able to compete, he’d be virtually a government monopoly, and he knows that most gov’t bureaucrats are on the Left. He’d laugh all the way to the bank if he got the government to make the rules, those rules would all favor him!
Yes, exactly. The same reason the big Chicago meatpackers welcomed and fanned the panic started by The Jungle and urged regulation that drove their small competitors out of business.
Zuckerberg has become megalomanical. Perhaps being a young guy who never held a job and is suddenly is worth BILLIONS right out of college can affect someone like that.
Just look at alexandra cortez’s 15 minutes of excrutiating fame.
Perhaps they need some sympathy. At the same time: break up the deranged monolpolies of Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Stop. Using. Facebook. Which part of that is so hard to understand?
Yes. The answer is not sending in the stormtroopers, it’s boycotting Facebook and Twitter. Stop using them. They are private businesses and have every right to censor users as they like. We don’t have to give them our eyeballs. Let the President stop tweeting, close his account, and call on everyone to do the same. And Facebook.
(I have no Twitter account. I do have a Facebook account because maybe twice a month I have a genuine need to use it. I just opened an Instagram account a few weeks ago because I entered a competition that required it. I will probably never use it.)
Wrong.
See:
Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins 447 U.S.74 (1980)
Issue:
Did PruneYard’s regulations violate the students’ free speech rights?
Holding:
Yes. Since the California Constitution protected “speech and petitioning, reasonably exercised, in shopping centers even when the shopping centers are privately owned,” PruneYard could not prevent the students from soliciting on its property. The Court argued that it was within California’s power to guarantee this expansive free speech right since it did not unreasonably intrude on the rights of private property owners.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/79-289
Would you think such intrusion on your property rights “not unreasonable”?
If I’m operating a “public accommodation”, which all businesses since 1964 have been classified as, I am required to serve everyone who wants my normal and customary services. In Facebook, et al, that is hosting a forum open to the public for communication.
Another lie. Public accommodations are not allowed to refuse service on specific grounds listed by law. They are free to refuse service on any other grounds the like.
“Public accomodations” are lawsuits simply inviting the right plaintiff. Kind of like bounties offered via legislation by the democrat/left to destroy business.
It has nothing to do what any of us think: as of now, the Supreme Court has held that’s the law.
The decision was UNANIMOUS.
Facebook and Google with fold in the face of a lawsuit using this case as precedent.
A lawsuit on what grounds? California law? You really think the California state courts are going to create a right for Republicans to post content to Facebook that it objects to?! On the contrary, they’ll be more eager to shut down conservative speech than FB is!
Sounds like it time for some conservative repatriations from these companies.
“Facebook is a feedlot. I’m free range.” ~Griffith Crowe
https://mtbassauthor.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/mtb1901-fictional-truths-facebook.jpg?w=1230&h=410
Because they are Marxists,really rather simple.
Crony-capitalists and limosine liberals, more likely.
Marxism is the excuse for fascist takeover and looting of the country by the privileged class. Just look at what happened under 8 years of obamaa/jarrett: the most corruption and Constitutional violations our nation has even seen.
Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies:
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Corruption-Cheats-Crooks-Cronies/dp/1596986204
As for his cronies, the GOPe were among them.
Marxists or not, totalitarians for sure.
Never mind what they say, consider what they do.
Banning of those commentators will continue until all conservative comments cease to exist.
Or until a Conservative-supporting Social Media platform is created to compete against Facebook (which will become a mere echo chamber for leftist thought).
The S-P’s (Socialist-Progressives/Marxists/Democrats) have been using Facebook, Twitter, etc. to market their message (lie to John Q) for a while now.
The Government is not going to move on this and John Q is going to get angrier and angrier.
When it explodes, which it will sooner or later, the great unwashed will just say, “Well, nobody could have seen this coming.”
Facebook, Twitter, etc. are being employed to generate Antifa flash mobs, which I believe is unlawful, but still the police do nothing – look at Portland.
New Zealand confiscates man’s pellet guns because police believe he is suspected of being a conservative.(he has never voted, has no criminal record).
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04/new-zealand-police-confiscate-airsoft-pellet-guns-crossbow-from-man-because-he-supports-trump/
New Zealand can afford such largese because of the Australian miltary. The Austrailian military can afford such largese to New Zealand because of the US military.
Anyone know anyone who would now spill a drop of blood to rescue New Zealand after their national suicide?
Coincidental that you should allude to ‘national suicide’ and New Zealand in the same sentence. How apropos. New Zealand not only holds the highest rate of youth suicide but is poised to legislatively instal assisted suicide euthanasia.
Secular globalist aficionado and devoted acolyte of neo-Marxist identity politics, cultural Marxism and political correctness, the current NZ minority Left wing government led by hijab wearing, virtue signaller extraordinaire, Comrade Jacinda Ardern, former President of the International Union of Socialist Youth is busily turning New Zealand into a one party police state, and making a splendid job of it.
Remember: a lot of crony-communist hollywood idiots have moved to New Zealand, and took their poisonous idiocy with them.
James Cameron, for example:
https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/james-camerons-house-4/view/google/
The Trump Justice Department should seize Facebook in civil forfeiture for the millions of crimes committed on its platform. It may also seize it for the millions of crimes committed by Facebook itself, such as defrauding advertisers by inflations of viewership.
Then auction off Facebook, as one might the Ferrari of a drug dealer.
I may obtain a writ of mandamus to force such a prosecution if the local federal prosecutor fails to respond to this request.
Allow the states to each do their own internet regulation. That will break up Facebook and Google into smaller entities. I’m against using government anti-trust action, because that just creates a bigger monopoly: the federal government. But changing the uniform regulatory environment into a non-uniform environment will encourage them to break themselves up.
(On my windows computer I’ve done the socially responsible thing and put some entries in my hosts file to block most Facebook domains.)
“Why is Facebook Targeting Conservative History-based Sites?”
You askin’ me?