I woke up this morning to the news that Facebook had banned me for 30 days from posting because of my viewpoints on the confederate flag. Someone at their company decided that my juxtaposition of the confederate flag with the nazi flag was a violation of their policies. This is disturbing on many levels, the first being that perhaps there is someone in Facebook who is purposely removing political ideas that they disagree with. Maybe there’s a guy over there who loves the Nazi agenda and is going around deleting posts that criticize racism? The second possibly is that someone in the middle of the night, offshore, didn’t understand the nuances of my argument and somehow thought I was promoting the confederate and nazi flag, which was far from the point at all.
Either way this is a scary infringement on my ability to express myself. While I understand that Facebook isn’t a government entity, they have become for many people, the way they express themselves politically about different issues. It means that depending on who is reviewing your political speech, religious speech, or even your nice notes to your family, you could lose your account on Facebook. Their complete lack of having any sort of recourse to this means that if they had an employee that was deleting people specifically for those reasons, there would be little or nothing anyone could do.
Facebook has come, for much of the world, the way we communicate with others, and they need to take that responsibility a lot more seriously than they currently do. We have heard the stories from people before: they post a photo of them breast feeding, they get banned. They talk about gay rights and posts photos of a pride event, and they get banned for being “too provocative.” We have no idea who are making these arbitrary decisions, but it could very well be someone outsourced from a country that finds gay rights offensive, or someone whose religious viewpoints hates breastfeeding. We don’t know.
It’s obviously conjecture, but that’s the point. I was banned for my criticism of the Confederate Flag as a racist symbol. Period.
You don’t have to agree with me on this, but you should be concerned that someone with a different viewpoint reported my post, and someone at Facebook then banned me for this criticism, deleted the post (which had been shared a few times) and effectively removed that message from the public sphere.
Even if I was on the other viewpoint (that the Confederate Flag isn’t racist) I shouldn’t be banned for my political view points. There is a lot of stuff on Facebook I disagree with, but I don’t have a right to stop their speech anymore than they have a right to stop mine. Their viewpoints in the public sphere are important in order to have this debate, for me to talk about their opinions, engage them, and perhaps even change their mind — or them change my mind.
With so much power, so many people using Facebook, is this type of arbitrary decision right?
