Primarily I'm a musician, essentially a happy-go-lucky small fish in a big pond. However, I've held a strong interest in politics since the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. I've spent a lot of time following politics. Once, I was a state representative in New Hampshire for two terms, and in 1990 I ran for congress calling for drug legalization -- this effectively ruined my public political career.
My whole life has been about music and politics, and since joining Facebook I've authored around 500 Facebook Notes on a variety of subjects.
Interestingly, last night I discovered Facebook very cleverly censored two controversial Facebook Notes that were extremely critical of main media.
Facebook accomplished this by outright banning one Note which included a couple dozen international journal links as references, one of which was the Veterans Today .com site. This Facebook Note was written well before Facebook banned that site, so in essence the Facebook action against me was retroactively enforced. This post, which got banned, included several hundred "likes." The content of this Note was my recommendation for dozens of investigative journalists I felt people should follow on Twitter, as well as an inclusion of links to several international news-related sites worth noting. Virtually each recommendation was rooted in progressive-left politics. This post is now completely gone from Facebook public consumption.
The second Facebook Note wasn't entirely banned, but I was informed by a Facebook Message I could no longer share it due to a reference to the Veterans Today site. It recommended I repair the problem so I could publish it. In fact, my post did not specifically include a reference the Veteran Today site. Rather it referenced the banned Facebook Note described in the above paragraph, which included a reference to that site. So the banned link wasn't even a direct connection -- it was a third generation connection!
The Facebook message recommended I remove the controversial site before it would again allow my post to become available of public consumption. This post already had achieved 238 likes.
But here is the kicker. I couldn't remove the third generation Veterans Today link because the second generation post, which included that link, had become banned. This meant there was no way possible to make the edit repair.
The result? Both Facebook Notes highly critical of mainstream media have become eliminated from Facebook!
Fortunately, I was able to copy and paste them onto Steemit. Below are the two posts in this Facebook controversy. [Note that I did some editing -- I eliminated all of the international journals, for example -- in the hope of avoiding a subsequent censoring type action.]
https://steemit.com/journalism/@michaelweddle/critical-news-sources
https://steemit.com/media/@michaelweddle/america-s-media-rather-than-cover-issues-it-controls-them
Finally, this is not the America. America is America only when freedom of speech exists!
Here is how I feel right now. I am the principle organizer now in the middle of organizing a huge charity event that will involve 50 rock n' roll bands, including high school musicians and veteran performers. The money raised will support the local high school music department and emphasize helping special needs musical students. I'm actually afraid to post this particular Steemit post onto Facebook for fear Facebook would ban or suspend me and this would disrupt my efforts to organize the very important charity event.