Has Facebook Censorship Gone Too Far?
When the town square is the rectangle of your laptop or smartphone, and the local sheriff is an algorithm trademarked by an unregulated and unabashed Mark Zuckerberg & Co., there’s no doubt trouble ahead for people who “like” free speech.
Facebook is censoring the news. While Facebook, a privately owned company, has every legal right — technically — to choose to publish or not publish anything it wants to, it has a moral obligation as the largest provider of the 21st century public square to not censor. Yet what it chooses to censor and to not censor apparently is subject to some deeply held secretive algorithm, has zero explainable reason, and has the chilling effect of creating an Orwellian state — none of which today’s society, enmeshed in an Arab Spring, an Occupy Wall Street Movement, and an upcoming 2012 U.S. election cycle, can afford.
Two personal examples.
On October 15, I attempted to share a link to a piece I had written about the Occupy Wall Street Movement — on Occupy Wall Street Movement Facebook pages, like Occupy Seattle, Occupy Miami, Occupy San Francisco. The piece, “Occupy Times Square: Over 10,000 Peaceful Protestors, So NYPD Arrests Dozens,” was less than flattering of the New York City Police Department’s treatment of Occupy Wall Street protestors — 10,000 that day had crowded Times Square — dozens of which the NYPD decided to arrest. I was there, camera in hand, reporting, and had raced home to edit my video and photos and to file several reports.
October 15 notice from Facebook
With no warning, and for no discernible reason, after posting a link to the piece on a very few “Occupy” sites (perhaps three?), I received a notice (image, right) from Facebook that claimed I was posting “spam and irrelevant content on Facebook pages.” The notice also came with the note that my account was being disable for fifteen days from posting any content on pages that were not mine.
In other words, Facebook had “decided” that the content I was sharing wasn’t content, that it was “spam,” or “irrelevant,” despite the very clear fact that it was neither.
Facebook offered no opportunity to challenge its decision, no option to protest, no option to appeal. Almost as bad, Facebook did not offer a credible reason as to why it deemed original news information as spam and irrelevant. And quite frankly, censoring a report of questionable police actions is a chilling notion.
But I decided, (and in hind site, not the best decision, and certainly uncharacteristic!) my time was better spent focusing on what I could control, rather than railing against Mark Zuckerberg’s Bloomberg-beholden behemoth, so I waited the fifteen days, which, as an aside, strongly impacted my ability to disseminate news.
(For those interested, this is my Facebook account, and this is the Facebook site for The New Civil Rights Movement. Rarely do I post anything personal to either. Feel free to rifle through them — or to follow/like/subscribe to them. You’ll find neither spam nor “irrelevant” content.)
Traffic at The New Civil Rights Movement suffered, though, fortunately, not immensely, as we essentially begged our 11,000 Facebook fans, my personal 1000+ Facebook friends, and our 23,000 Twitter followers to take up the slack. (Approximately 18%, annually, of traffic to the site comes via Facebook, just behind Google News, and ay in front of traffic from Twitter.) But our ability to touch, directly, those most-interested in the Occupy Wall Street Movement news was impacted greatly. Would traffic — and thus, dissemination of relevant news — have been higher, had Facebook’s draconian censorship not taken place? I have to believe, yes.
That was example number one.
Example number two occurred Sunday.
Facebook Blocked Content Notice from November 6
After editing our “Week In Review” segment, I attempted to share it on Facebook on my personal page. I received an even more draconian censorship notice: “Warning: This message contains blocked content. Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.” My first thought was, “that’s odd,” as this is an original post and was just published a few seconds prior. My second thought was, OK, that’s their problem, and I’ll take the heat if a Facebook user wants to report my site’s content as “abusive.” So I tried to post it again.
The post was not only tagged as “abusive,” but Facebook would not allow me to post it to my own page, anyway!
The title of the article was, ironically, “Week In Review: A Zygote Is A Person?, Eurozone Greek Crisis, NJ Gay Marriage, Internet Freedom.”
What could be considered so “abusive” in a weekly news review? Was it the Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations story? Was it the NJ gay marriage story? Was it the Internet freedom story? Was it the Mississippi personhood bill story?
News, by its very nature, is often uncomfortable. The New Civil Rights Movement works very hard every day to present information respectfully and in an intelligent context. The dozens of journalists, bloggers, other news sites that link regularly to our content don’t see it as “abusive,” so who is some algorithm at Facebook to deem it so — and to take the extraordinary measures of banning its publication?
Facebook, and other social media sites, such as Twitter, and Google +, or Reddit, Digg, and other news dissemination networks, have a moral obligation to not censor content — especially content that is not by any means hate speech. When news is censored by the largest content distribution vehicle on the planet, the world has indeed become a very scary place. Who know what — or who — will be next?
Ironically, last year ago I wrote several stories attempting to get Facebook to shut down sites that actually were abusive. Anti-gay hate speech Facebook groups and Facebook pages — that in any other country would be banned and their authors sent to jail — had been allowed to stay, unaddressed, for months.
We were successful in getting Facebook to shutter groups/pages like, “Kill All Gays,” “I HATE GAYS,” “STOP AIDS!!!!! KILL GAYS AN NIGGERS!!!!!!!!!,” “GAY ? news flash : we fuckin’ hate you !!,” and, “join if you hate homosexuals,” for example.
Can the distinction be made between a journalist posting a link to original content — news about NYPD crackdown on lawful protestors or a basic news story — and a hate group? Using a test many courts of law embrace — the “reasonable person test,” I would have to say, yes. Wouldn’t you?
So, why does Facebook, which boasts more than 800 million active users — almost three times the number of U.S. residents — feel it has not only the right but the obligation to spuriously ban some content that is far from “abusive,” and ban users who are posting original news items, and for weeks?
Facebook’s censoring arm has gone much too far. When the town square is the rectangle of your laptop or smartphone, and the local sheriff is an algorithm trademarked by an unregulated and unabashed Mark Zuckerberg & Co., there’s no doubt trouble ahead for people who “like” free speech.
Editor’s note: Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
Inside the Group Helping MAGA Voters Walk Away — And What Finally Pushed Them
