Editors at the Washington Examiner share concerns about social media outlets’ efforts to stifle speech.
Facebook has now claimed that its permanent ban on Heroes of Liberty — a children’s book publisher specializing in biographies of such figures as former President Ronald Reagan, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and economist Thomas Sowell — was simply “an error.”
In the absence of some further explanation of what the error was, this is a completely unsatisfactory explanation.
What appears to have happened in reality is that one of Facebook’s many rabid leftist employees pulled the trigger to censor conservative content, a story as common in the world of social media as turkey is at Thanksgiving dinner.
In this case, Facebook actually took ad money from Heroes of Liberty and then refused to show their advertisements, supposedly on the grounds that their product was “low quality” or “disruptive.”
There is no reason to think that this company’s work product is either of those things. Yet somehow, Facebook not only flagged the material but also denied the company’s appeal and instituted a permanent ban. This means that an actual human being working for this social media company looked at this case and consciously decided to discriminate against a conservative children’s book publisher.
Shocking, right?
An “error” is a mistake in adding numbers, a misplaced punctuation mark, or an accidental sending of an email to the wrong John Smith. But one can hardly call it an “error” that Facebook, Twitter, and other big tech companies consistently discriminate against conservative viewpoints and ban conservatives any time there is even the remotest potential justification.
Social media companies often decry as “conspiracy theories” the mere statement of facts that liberals dislike, which often turn out later to be indisputably true. Consider, for example, just three examples: the New York Post’s accurate pre-election story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the lab-leak theory of the novel coronavirus, and the failure of the coronavirus vaccines to stop the spread of COVID.
