You have got some set of balls, yes you do.
Yesterday, Facebook put my wife in detention for three days
because she wrote a five-word comment calling Laura Ingraham (or some such
person) “a female devil.”
Oh, the horror!
Oh, the horror!
This is the same Facebook that recognizes Breitbart News as
a legitimate journalistic organization, has refused to ban political advertising
that it knows to be false, sat back throughout 2016 and let Russian bots
manipulate voters in the presidential election and considers nude photos of
Melania Trump (which she got paid for) to be out of bounds, even though it
allows users to post memes that are 100 times worse.
(They punished my wife for posting a Melania photo, too.
More on that later.)
At the same time, I don’t hear any outrage from Facebook
when Donald Trump’s White House posts blatant lies that are easily fact-checked
by people with a brain, or campaign videos that distort the facts and smear
decent Americans, or faked photos that purport to show the president watching a
raid by Special Forces in Syria that was set up two hours after the fact.
Just what kind of ‘community standards’ are those?
Want more? How about Trump calling the news media “the enemy
of the people” and declaring that Republicans who oppose him are “scum?” Is
that not hateful enough for you, Mr. Zuckerberg? How about his insulting
nicknames for Democratic leaders and presidential contenders, and the way he
trashes the reputations of upstanding Americans like James Comey, John Brennan,
James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller…hell, I’m only halfway through the
alphabet.
What exactly IS hate speech, Facebook? Is it jokingly (and
harmlessly) calling Laura Ingraham the devil, or is it inciting one’s followers
to take violent action against working journalists by repeatedly calling them
the enemy of the people? Do I have to explain to you which is worse?
Getting back to the two times my wife has been censured or
suspended by Facebook, I want to point out two things:
(1) First, with regard to Melania Trump, our esteemed First Lady
is only in this country because she came here as a model under an “Einstein Visa”
that was based on a college degree she doesn’t have. After her arrival, she worked
illegally as a nude model without a work permit, then married a rich guy to
stay in the country, produced an anchor baby to solidify her citizenship and then
brought her parents here under chain migration – all activity that the Trump
Administration wants to deny to other migrants. If Facebook considers all of
that to be kosher, then photos she posed for during that time should be fair
game as well. After all, that’s why she was here.
(2) Second, calling someone a "female devil" is certainly not hate
speech. It’s not like using the N-word or saying something anti-semitic or homophobic or
using various other nicknames for brown people or calling their home countries “shitholes.”
In fact, calling someone a devil might be considered a compliment if you’re a
Satanist, and under the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause, Satanism
would be a recognized religion. How does Facebook know my wife wasn’t issuing a
compliment? The entire comment read, “She is a female devil,” so where does
that define intent? Who decides what’s hate speech and what is a casual, joking
rebuke?
It also raises one other question: Does Facebook have one
employee assigned to monitor everything my wife posts or did somebody rat her
out? If it’s the latter, maybe I’ll start reporting some people, too. I mean,
what’s good for uptight conservatives ought to be good for freewheeling liberals
as well...and I've got a lot of complaints to report. So buckle up, Facebook. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
P.S. If I get censured, suspended or banned for this blog,
you can read it at https://shieldwall16.blogspot.com.
I suggest you hurry up and write down that address before Facebook makes my whole blog disappear.
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