Facebook Plays Speech Cop
Facebook employees are apparently creating exceptions to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vow to refrain from policing political speech: On Thursday, the social-media giant took down a Trump-campaign ad — citing a preposterous rationale.
“We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate,” a Facebook spokesman said: They showed a red, upside-down triangle similar to what Nazis used to classify political prisoners, so they violated the platform’s ban on “using a hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
Huh? There are no political prisoners in question here. And Team Trump was clearly condemning the symbol — which is indeed linked to antifa — because the ad included the words: “STOP ANTIFA.”
In any event, most Americans probably have no idea that the triangle is linked to either the Nazis or antifa. Indeed, a campaign spokesman notes that Facebook itself “has an inverted red triangle emoji in use.”
But soon after various left-wing groups started pushing claims that the Trump ads used Nazi symbols, Facebook agreed.
There are only two possible explanations for the company’s decision: 1) Its speech cops are confused and incapable of figuring out what speech to ban. 2) They’re looking for any excuse to silence the president and his team or make them look bad. Both may have factored in Thursday’s decision.
Surely Facebook’s censors missed the irony of banning an ad that attacked antifa by showing its link to a Nazi symbol. And that the Nazis themselves and antifa today are both known for silencing speech and censoring others, as Facebook did.
Since last fall, Zuckerberg has vowed not to police political ads, given the importance of “people having the power to express themselves.” Free speech may be fraught, he suggested, but “the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us.”
“We must continue to stand for free expression,” said Zuck. To his credit, he has stuck to that principle despite significant protest from many Facebook employees.
Either the boss has changed his mind or his minions are determined to end-run him.