Two days ago, I was censored by Facebook for exposing Facebook’s censorship.
Holy shit. pic.twitter.com/WXz4jKCfZG
— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) May 21, 2016
Facebook removed one of my friend’s posts from Facebook. Shortly thereafter, he was banned.
I then made a post that derided Facebook for having literally censored conservatives (right after they’d made a fuss of promising they wouldn’t). The post was almost immediately removed, apparently due to a violation of “Facebook Community Standards”.
About five minutes later, I had been banned.
I'm banned on @facebook for a month for saying Facebook is censoring conservatives. pic.twitter.com/oKStHdEGNM
— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) May 21, 2016
Luckily by the next day, my tweets highlighting the ban had spread like wildfire over the Internet. A few minutes after an article from this website was posted on The Drudge Report, my ban was miraculously lifted. This never happens – bans are almost always something you simply have to suck up and wait out.
Unfortunately, you see this all the time with smaller conservative and libertarian pages being taken down for no reason. It was happening long before the mainstream became aware of Facebook’s bias, and they will continue as long as they can get away with it.
If I hadn’t had support from major conservative figures, I wouldn’t have had any recourse. I would just be banned. Facebook is only interested in saving face.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, either. Several months ago, when I had fewer Facebook followers, I was repeatedly banned for posting antifeminist content on my Facebook. In my case, and for many other right-wing Facebook users, these are not bans for bad behaviour, but bans for wrongthink or just for making jokes.
They are going back & removing my older posts critical of feminism. 3 day block for a post I've had for months. pic.twitter.com/EPwB6qUTkm
— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) March 4, 2016
Hey @facebook how in the hell does this violate your community standards. Give me my account back. pic.twitter.com/aQWFzHXVmc
— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) March 4, 2016
And when I once asked for comment, this is the response I got:
I'm going to take that as a no ~ @facebook pic.twitter.com/zzJVYv1gwi
— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) March 4, 2016
Yes, really.
Unsurprisingly I never got any personal apology, ban removal or re-uploading of my content for these posts, which received minimal press coverage. “Errors” only get fixed when Facebook has a PR problem.
This kind of issue keeps popping up with Facebook, and I’m not convinced anything will be resolved anytime soon. We keep on seeing conservative and libertarian users and groups banned for non-offenses. Pages such as Anti-Feminism Australia and Exposing Feminism have been unpublished – and almost every anti-SJW page I like is a sequel, as it’s now running on its backup page. (Post Tumblr Stress Disorder II, O Canada II, Social Justice Warriors: The Return… the list goes on and on).
If Facebook is serious about making amends with conservatives, they have to start with individual users – not just establishment conservatives and those who received international press after their ban. Anything less would ring false.
Now, Facebook is a private company. They can do what they like. But they could at least stop lying to us when they say they want Facebook to be a “platform for all ideas”. Facebook is, for the time being, a “platform for liberal ideas”. It’s clear they don’t want conservatives or their ideas anywhere on the site.
But from someone like Mark Zuckerberg, what can you expect? Zuckerberg is a social progressive who has repeatedly maligned Donald Trump and supported open-borders-style immigration reform. Recently, Zuckerberg scorned employees who dared to remove the slogan of the racially charged “Black Lives Matter” movement from Facebook’s office walls.
Zuckerberg declared that Facebook was to become a platform “for all”, and that Facebook would have to be a place for all viewpoints to be tolerated. Curiously, though, he didn’t cop to having made any mistakes. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook ”has found no evidence” of wrongdoing.
No, instead he patted himself on the back by promising to continue using Facebook’s resources to “give more people a voice and bring our global community together”. He later went on to invite several dozen docile establishment conservatives to Facebook HQ, and held one of the most pointless, self-congratulatory meetings of all time.
Speaking of pointless, I did eventually receive a formal response from Facebook:
(Their trending topics team must have switched to moderation duty.)
This is just pathetic – there’s not any acknowledgement that anyone has done anything wrong, beyond the mention of one unspecified person committing one unspecified instance of “human error”. Nevermind the fact that multiple posts of mine have been removed before, and that I’d never before even gotten this level of half-assed response.
(It’s always a fun little process, jumping back to my Facebook tab and seeing the “You’ve been logged out of your account, please click here to log back in” message on my screen. You know you’re in deep shit with Zuckerberg when that happens.)
Evidently, this response wasn’t quite enough. Maybe they got wind of the overwhelming public sentiment supporting my case. They felt obliged to offer another, more personal apology:
Facebook will claim they are listening to conservatives, and that they are working to improve their policies, while simultaneously claiming they’ve discovered no problems (despite widespread reports to the contrary) and claiming every instance of censorship stems from the ever-elusive “human error”, or is just the byproduct of conservatives’ imaginations.
What you’ll never hear them talk about is what “human error” looks like. Someone actually read through those Facebook posts and made the decision that they were unacceptable. Curiously, these “errors” seem to be besetting people almost exclusively on one side of the political spectrum. These bans have every appearance of being targeted.
If this is how Facebook is going to keep treating rightwingers – putting up a facade of acceptance while simultaneously post-blocking us – we might as well just abandon ship now. But with Twitter going down the pipes as well, there’s not many places left to go.
These companies are purposely censoring information in order to change people’s minds. During a meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel, Mark Zuckerberg agreed to “[doing] some work” to shift public opinion to be more supportive of refugees. This is way more than just a private company doing what’s best for their business.
If you don’t find that scary, you should.
