Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

I am familiar with those lawsuits. Alex Jones did not promote harassment. He did not even factually conclude that Sandy Hook was a hoax, just floated the possibility.

He reported on anomalies, on the conspiracy, on using Sandy Hook as a pretext to take away guns, on Adam Lanza probably using big pharma drugs. He stated that he understands why people would see Sandy Hook as a hoax, because history shows other events have been staged to further a political agenda.

Alex Jones was himself a victim of the media, who put weeks long pressure on SV tech companies and made it look like Alex Jones was sending his followers to harass the victims, long after Alex concluded it was not a hoax, and that Adam Lanza was the killer. They purposely took his statements and unhinged rants out of context and painted him as a transphobic, violence instigator, and maker of death threats.

The trick to attack free speech that is opposed to yours, is to make it seem like violence instigation or racism, so then it does not deserve the protection of free speech. The other is to put pressure on advertisers and commercial platforms and make them guilty by association. We've seen both of those tricks and they are dangerous and spell trouble for the future.

>He has pushed very hard for black people to be proud of their blackness and to create narratives in which blackness is not looked down upon. This is good, needed work.

(disclaimer : i'm about as anti FB and anti-censorship as one can be.)

Well, he (Farrakhan) mostly just taught blacks to hate whites -- which I guess achieves more 'black pride', but not in any manner that I think is sustainable or responsible. Rather than raising one group up, he just taught that the other group was worse than perceived.

"White people are potential humans – they haven’t evolved yet."

“You are not now, nor have you ever been a citizen of America. You are a slave to white America.”

and my personal favorite, although unrelated to whites in America :

“Qadaffi’s a revolutionary, he’s my friend, he’s my brother. And I would never deny him because you don’t like him… I love him.”

Monopolies do not get to just call themselves a private concern, able to do what they want. We only tolerate monopolies with suitable regulation. For example, we do not allow water, electricity, or other things provided by monopolies to be cut by a company when the company disagrees with the customer's political or other views.

In addition, the US federal government only exists to protect the innumerable rights of US citizens. Some of these rights are enumerated in the constitution. It is therefore well within the scope of the federal government to protect citizens against bully companies like Facebook who are infringing on these rights.

> Is it your view that a man's property rights are inversely proportional to the number of people who covet his property?

In so many words - I guess. I don't think property rights are naturally extended to Facebook as a global communication medium even if the communication does happen primarily on their property. I suppose I should have written that in the first place! At the very least, respecting those rights is not the paramount virtue. I also believe that the claim "private property first amendment need not apply" is not, by and large, a principled stance when ostensibly the same mob eg cheers on the lawsuit against a bakery for not making a cake.

Sorry for the snark earlier.

Giving equal air time to falsehoods and inciteful language is in my opinion dangerous. An anti-vaxxer should not be given the same air time as a scientifically accredited researcher who has decades of research behind them. We don't give holocaust deniers a platform and I don't believe we should give any other racial or religious hate speech anything remotely approaching equal air time.

Facebook is a platform that allows children (13+) and families to share posts and content. I don't see how they can simultaneously provide an environment for religious and racial hate speech and anti-vaxxers to spread their FUD without compromising on one or the other. Either you're family friendly or you're a platform for 'edgy' content.

The right to free speech (in the US at least) is a tremendous and wonderful thing but there's no mention that every fool should be given equal air time in every newspaper, TV programme or now on private content platforms like Facebook. There are sites aimed at providing a haven for edgy or outright false and inciteful speech. Facebook and in my opinion Twitter are not it.