As you may have heard, yesterday Facebook purged more than 800 pages and accounts, primarily political pages. The timing is suspect, with it being a month before the mid-term elections. The stated target was pages who operate for political profit or engaged in political spam. However, some of the pages that were shut down were anything but that. Some of the pages include:
The Free Thought Project
The Anti-Media
Reasonable People Unite
Cop Block
Police the Police
Abby Martin
RT America
"The Free Thought Project" and "The Anti-Media" highlight news stories from independent journalists that don't get coverage in mainstream media. They are non-partisan- highlighting corruption from both major parties. "Reasonable People Unite" is a progressive page that engages in thoughtful political activism. "Cop Block" and "Police the Police" catalog news articles about police brutality and police misconduct. Abby Martin is a respected journalist that has headed multiple news organizations. "RT America" is a Russian news outlet operating in the US. All of these are legitimate news sources, just not mainstream ones. These were not propaganda pages, they were activist pages and news article aggregators.
Meanwhile, pages that engage entirely in political propaganda using outright lies and half truths, like "Occupy Democrats" and "God Emporer Trump" are still operational. Pages that dig deep into news, offer new views and carry stories ignored by the mainstream are shut down, while the worst sort of right vs left political propaganda pages remain up. This makes the overall content less smart. That means that Facebook users are now engaging and supporting a community that engages in active censorship.
But it is worse than that. We fund that censorship. Facebook makes it's money from it's user base, from their posts, from their information, which is sells. Users are the funding mechanism for the company. Users are funding censorship. When you post or share on Facebook, you are funding censorship. You are funding their shady business practices. You are funding a snuffing of intelligent and investigative journalism.
Would you support a store that gave 10% of it's profits to censorship? I think most people would not. Or maybe they would. Maybe people would use a grocery store or plumber or clothing shop that actively supported censorship if it was convenient enough. But I hope not. Conscious capitalism requires educated and moral participants. If we support censorship with our time and money, we are complicit to the spread of that censorship. At this point in history, choosing to post and share on Facebook is the same as tossing books into a fire. Ponder that before you choose to post the next time.
As a private company, Facebook has the right to allow and disallow anything they choose. We also have the choose to support them or not and I am choosing to not. I just can't be on the side of history that supports censorship.