Yesterday Zuckerberg unleashed his inquisitors and they found a lot of heretics:
Facebook said it was removing the publishers and accounts not because of the type of content they posted, but because of the behaviors they engaged in, including spamming Facebook groups with identical pieces of content and using fake profiles.
“Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the company said in a blog post. “People will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.”
So what kind of pages were removed? As of this writing, Cop Block’s main Facebook page has been unpublished along with a number of its state affiliate pages. Gun Laws Don’t Work, V for Voluntary, Punk Rock Libertarians, and many other anti-state pages were also found guilty of heresy.
This is where most libertarians flip their shit about Facebook’s censorship… on Facebook. I won’t debase myself in such a manner. Instead I will point out that it was foolish for so many anti-statists to centralized their content on a site owned and operated by a statist. While I recognize how easy Facebook makes it to reach a large audience, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. In exchange for accessing Facebook’s audience you have to submit to Facebook’s policies and those policies are (probably purposefully) vague and in a constant state of flux. One minute Facebook takes a hands off approach to content, the next it erases dissenting voices like the black plague erasing Europeans.
Of course this entire mess could have been avoided by simply doing the pre-Facebook status quo. Had all of these organizations kept their audience focused on their own websites and forums, there would have been nothing for Zuckerberg’s inquisitors to censor. Instead they opted for the ease of relying on Facebook. They pushed their audience to Facebook and thus put themselves under the rule of Zuckerberg. Now they’re paying the price. Some of these organizations are fortunate enough to still have their own websites and forums so they haven’t been completely erased but most weren’t so smart.
Once again I find myself beating this bloated corpse of a horse that is advocating for individuals and organizations to stop relying on centralized technologies and instead rely on their own infrastructure. Sadly, I know that the innards of this corpse are going to burst forth and spill all over the place before anybody follows my advice.
I agree 100%. I also hate it that conservatives (and probably some self-proclaimed libertarians as well) say things like “I’m in favor of a laissez-faire society, BUT, the other side isn’t playing nice; therefore I want the government to enter the fray and monitor and correct Facebook’s policies.” They might as well say, “I believe in basing one’s life and one’s actions on PRINCIPLE, not expediency; however, I’ve found some imbalance that urgently needs remedying, so forget principle, and let’s hear it for expediency!”
Your final paragraph expresses near despair at the condition of the world, but take heart. This kind of struggle has been around since mankind came into existence, and hasn’t killed us off yet. And today we have tools our ancestors could barely dream about to help spread the word. I don’t think the government or other hysterics can succeed in preventing people from getting their message out on the web. Or if today’s web gets throttled successfully, some other tool for communication that will arise, I feel sure.
If I had a dollar for every time a self-proclaimed principled individual made this argument to justify putting their principles aside, I’d be reading this from my mega-yacht in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s an immediate argument against whatever principles by which they proclaim to abide.