“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
—Voltaire
Zuck’s community standards are violated when you express an opinion that isn’t leftwing.
Via Zerohedge
Over the weekend, we were surprised to learn that some readers were prevented by Facebook when attempting to share Zero Hedge articles. Subsequently it emerged that virtually every attempt to share or merely mention an article, including in private messages, would be actively blocked by the world’s largest social network, with the explanation that “the link you tried to visit goes against our community standards.”
We were especially surprised by this action as neither prior to this seemingly arbitrary act of censorship, nor since, were we contacted by Facebook with an explanation of what “community standard” had been violated or what particular filter or article had triggered the blanket rejection of all Zero Hedge content.
To be sure, as a for-profit enterprise with its own unique set of corporate “ethics”, Facebook has every right to impose whatever filters it desires on the media shared on its platform. It is entirely possible that one or more posts was flagged by Facebook’s “triggered” readers who merely alerted a censorship algo which blocked all content.
Alternatively, it is just as possible that Facebook simply decided to no longer allow its users to share our content in retaliation for our extensive coverage of what some have dubbed the platform’s “many problems”, including chronic privacy violations, mass abandonment by younger users, its gross and ongoing misrepresentation of fake users, ironically – in retrospect – its systematic censorship and back door government cooperation (those are just links from the past few weeks).
Unfortunately, as noted above, we still don’t know what event precipitated this censorship, and any attempts to get feedback from the company with the $500 billion market cap, have so far remained unanswered.
We would welcome this opportunity to engage Facebook in a constructive dialog over the company’s decision to impose a blanket ban on Zero Hedge content. Alternatively, we will probably not lose much sleep if that fails to occur: unlike other websites, we are lucky in that only a tiny fraction of our inbound traffic originates at Facebook, with most of our readers arriving here directly without the aid of search engines (Google banned us from its News platform, for reasons still unknown, shortly after the Trump victory) or referrals.
That said, with Facebook increasingly under political, regulatory and market scrutiny for its arbitrary internal decisions on what content to promote and what to snuff, its ever declining user engagement, and its soaring content surveillance costs, such censorship is hardly evidence of the platform’s “openness” to discourse, its advocacy of free speech, or its willingness to listen to and encourage non-mainstream opinions, even if such “discourse” takes place in some fake user “click farm” somewhere in Calcutta.
More:
https://twitter.com/PKsbpdl/status/1105250713221902341
Facebook’s staff is manipulative, unethical, dishonest, and leftwing. (Who didn’t know this?) Its reputation for censoring viewpoints it doesn’t like, is well documented.
Conservative sites have been suspended over Zuckerberg’s political preferences, but leftie blogs and muzzie pro-terrorist Facebook pages and posts are relatively unscathed. Case in point: Conservative pundit Paul Joseph Watson got death threats from a muzzie Facebook page, but according to Facebook it ‘doesn’t violate community standards’.
Lauren Southern, a conservative commentator, was banned from Facebook for 30 days because she posted a comment that criticized the left-leaning hierarchy’s habit of censoring opposing viewpoints. The irony is lost on The Zuck.
They’ve censored much of what I try to post from my blog.
If you’re going to have a site that supports your opinions, fine. Just don’t claim to be ‘neutral’ and don’t bother with the façade of “community standards”.
I have joined GAB, where opinions can be freely expressed without censorship. I suggest you do the same if you’re fed up with the bullshit. I’m going to be off Facebook for awhile. I don’t know if I’ll be back on Zuck’s site any time soon.
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