Ironic Timing

I’ve been writing this blog since March 2011. I’ve written over 1400 posts. I never got censored—until last month, when my December 7 post was taken down by Blogger. It was about the House report on the response to that illness I guess I’m not supposed to talk about, even though I was referring to the findings of a government committee (and even though I had literally written freely on the issue dozens of times since 2020).

For many years I have followed up my posts here with a post on Facebook linking to it, to make it more convenient for friends to find what I’ve written.

I had a sense I’d been shadow banned a couple of times on Facebook, but no way to prove it. I don’t spend a lot of time (any) trying to get engagement, so if there’s less, I could hardly tell. Sometimes those little notices showed up, warning people about possible misinformation, with a link to some “trusted” source—which, as a result of that House report, we now know was actually a link to propagandistic misinformation. But Facebook had never given me a warning or taken down a post. Until last Friday.

I wrote about the enumerated powers in the US Constitution. I’ve written about that a number of times before. Talking about what’s in the Constitution seems pretty safe from violating “community standards.” I posted late in the evening on January 2. Facebook immediately removed it and told me I had violated community standards. They didn’t say what specifically I had done. I clicked, to see if they would tell me more, before I had taken a screenshot, which I regret. I was just so surprised. So I may have missed a clue.

I protested that I had not violated community standards and asked for a review. They said they would get back to me, and that usually takes 4 days, but could be longer. Today makes a full week. There is no word. There is no way, that I have discovered, to find out anything about the post. My account has no strikes against it and is in good standing, it appears.

I have read through the community standards. I cannot find anything that I may have violated, even inadvertently.

One thing I have noticed, just the past month or two, is a change in other accounts on Facebook that link to outside content. I first noticed it with Dinesh D’Souza, and later with various people from the Daily Wire—Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles. I’m sure there are others doing it. (Maybe everyone else got a memo that I didn’t.) They make a statement, just words on a colored background. And you have to click on comments to get a link to the linked material. I find this really annoying. You can’t even get the title of what is being linked to until you go to the comments, so you don’t know if it’s worth it. Sometimes you don’t get a full idea of what the content is about until you click through to the actual linked article, which is only worth it if you really trust the source and seek more of their content.

I see no advantage to the content provider—unless it is to avoid some obscure (unfindable) Facebook rule about linking to somewhere beyond Facebook. One would think that, when you’re on another platform, and it asks you if you want to share, and Facebook comes up as one of the buttons to make that easy, that it would mean Facebook is good with sharing such content, assuming it doesn’t violate their other community standards, many of which are reasonable to avoid theft, fraud, libel, child exploitation, and other actual crimes.

Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg announced just this week, Tuesday, January 7, that they are removing their fact checkers, and letting go of the whole censorship gig they’ve been providing for the current regime. He doesn’t sound like he’s crazy, or lying. I guess we'll see.

Mark Zuckerberg makes announcement about
changes to Facebook. Screenshot from here.

Here are the things he listed that Facebook/Meta is going to do:

1.      Remove fact checkers; replace them with Community Notes, similar to X. [I found a description of Community Notes here.]     

2.      Simplify content policies; get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

3.      Change enforcement policies; no longer filter for any and all policy violations; focus on illegal and high severity violations; no action on lower severity violations until someone reports an issue.

4.      Bring back civic content; this means political content can be recommended again, because people are ready to see this content again. [I’d like to say more about this overt censorship, which he seems comfortable with doing, based on their subjective sense of what people want to see, but maybe I’ll save that for another time.]

5.      Move US-based content review to Texas, rather than in California, where bias has been an issue. [The next day there was a surprise announcement to PolitiFact that Facebook would no longer be using them; that means huge layoffs for them. I’m not particularly sad for them.]

6.      Work with President Trump to push back on pressure to censor in other countries. While the US is the most pro-free-speech nation, with the Biden administration pushing for more censorship, other countries have been emboldened. There’s hope for support from Trump.

I guess things will be phased in. As of today, the community standards still say you can’t say anything against any kind of jab, because they want to uphold their certain beliefs (which, as I said, Facebook never actually censored me for; only Blogger, a Google platform, did that). I don't know about other topics.

I did a little research, to see if censoring linked content was a thing. Linked content is a problem. Facebook, and for that matter pretty much any platform, wants users to stay on the platform. But their practice has been to demote the content, with an algorithm, so it gets seen by fewer people. Not surprising, actually. Facebook has taken that further by sometimes adding a warning, such as, “Are you sure you want to follow this link?” as though wherever you’re going might be a threat to your computer safety. (It tends to work; many people see that and think, “I don’t want to risk it.”) But I didn’t find anything to say that they actually removed your content for having an external link in it.

Putting the link in the comments is indeed a way to “hide” the external link. And I think that will have to be what I do in the future. However, the drawback is that phone users have a harder time accessing the comments. So it’s a tradeoff: use a link and get fewer views (or in my case, get the post removed entirely), or put the link in comments and make it harder for people to view it.

If I’m wrong and my “violation” wasn’t the external link, but was content related, I don’t know how to solve that. Do they really find a discussion of the enumerated powers of the Constitution a risk to public safety? It may be that fact checkers actually do believe that.

In case you read here regularly, in late October I wrote a piece about the death throes of the "propaganda beast." I got censored after that, on two platforms that had not censored me before. So was I wrong? I don't think so. I think this is just part of the thrashing out of a cornered, dying beast.

There’s a fact checker (not used by Facebook) that I actually refer to frequently, called JustFacts. They back up what they say with data and, well, just facts. (As a result, they do appear to lean conservative.) Yesterday’s (January 9th) email included a response to the Mark Zuckerberg news, with links to 21 fact checker fails. I’ll include that portion of their email below, along with the links:

Facebook’s “Fact Checkers”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook is “going to get rid of fact checkers” because they have “been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

 

For years, Just Facts has been documenting that Facebook-approved fact checkers like PolitiFact have incessantly spread falsehoods that support left-wing agendas. Here’s 21 glaring examples and the actual facts that refute them:

 

1) Covid-19 death rate

2) Market value of Mar-a-Lago

3) Biden’s role in the murder of Laken Riley

4) Income taxes paid by illegal immigrants

5) Late-term abortions

6) mRNA Covid vaccines

7) Violent crime trends

8) Effects of the federal “assault weapons” ban

9) Democrat Party’s role in the Ku Klux Klan

10) Impact of Obamacare on Medicare

11) Tax rates paid by the wealthy

12) Child hunger rates

13) Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq

14) Arming teachers

15) Pace of illegal immigration

16) Crime rates of illegal immigrants

17) Twitter misinformation

18) Antifa’s role in the Capitol Hill riot

19) Illegal voting by non-citizens

20) Live birth abortions

21) The “bipartisan” border security bill

 

 

 

Self-Evident No Longer

The Constitution doesn’t grant us rights. It’s the other way around. We, the People, grant certain limited, enumerated powers to the federal government.

There’s a reason we need to limit government power. Mainly, it’s because governments have a long and storied history of tyranny. In other words, governments can’t be trusted to limit their power.

The first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were added before the Constitution itself was ratified. The original Constitution didn’t include them, not because there was any question about the importance of those rights. It didn’t include them because they were self-evident; they were so widely understood to exist that they went without saying.

Then the representatives of several of the states spoke up. What if there came a time when these things weren’t still understood? Maybe some of them needed to be spelled out, just as an additional guarantee. This included Virginia’s George Mason, who had proposed major portions of the Constitution, but was suddenly saying he wouldn’t vote for the Constitution unless it contained these guarantees.

What is a right? In the context of the Bill of Rights, we’re talking about natural rights. That means the rights you’re born with. You’re granted these by God, because you are a human being.

There are five listed in the First Amendment. Most of these have to do with freedom to think, or express ideas: 

·         Right of Freedom of Religion

·         Right of Free Speech

·         Right of Freedom of the Press

·         Right to Peaceably Assemble

·         Right to Petition the Government for redress of grievances

    

So, you can believe what you want, and live your religion, even in public. You can say what you believe. You can publish what you believe. You can gather together with other like-minded people. And, if there’s any disagreement about government infringing on your rights, you can sue to hold the government accountable.

We’ve had plenty of contrasting evidence, much of it in the past century, showing what harm comes to the people when government tyranny steps on these rights.

The Second Amendment concerns the right to protect yourself. The main proper role of government is to protect us—our lives, liberty, and property. We hire government to take on this role so that we don’t have to spend all our time and energy protecting ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we give up our right to protect ourselves as well.

It’s like any other service. If you hire someone to clean your house, that relieves you of much of the need to do it yourself, but you don’t give up the right and ability to do some additional cleaning yourself whenever you feel like it. If your kid spills cereal all over the floor, you’re not required to leave it there until the cleaning service arrives.

If you’re receiving particular threats, you might hire your own extra security team, in addition to the local, state, and federal police forces. They’re busy spreading their protective force across the whole population, so you might not feel confident they’ll be on hand when you’re vulnerable. You retain the right to protect yourself. If someone tries to attack you, physically or with a weapon, you have a right to protect yourself—even physically or with a weapon.

There’s an extra, historical meaning attached to the Second Amendment. It has to do with defense against government. The founders knew, because they’d had to break free from tyranny, that they needed weapons to prevent that tyranny from coercing them into submission. The Constitution prevents government from getting out of hand—but only if government is held to obedience. Government could come and threaten your life, liberty, or property as easily as any thug. Maybe easier, since a thug may have to face prosecution. Who do you appeal to if government is the perpetrator?

Anyway, foreseeing the possibility, because they’d lived through it before, the founders guaranteed the right to self-protection from both outlaws and government.

We could go through the rest of the amendments as well. But let’s summarize by pointing out that the Ninth Amendment says that, just because it isn’t enumerated here doesn’t mean the people don’t have other rights. And the Tenth Amendment says those powers not delegated to the federal government are still held by the states and the people.

It’s troubling when people, in ignorance, start saying things like, “They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment,” as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said a couple of weeks ago. Is a former justice ignorant? Apparently. Did he fail to read the Ninth Amendment? Because we would still have the right to self-defense whether it is written in the Constitution or not.

Pretending that “common sense gun laws” that restrict law-abiding citizens doesn’t interfere with the right of self-defense is disingenuous. It’s not a matter of weapon availability. People have said, partly in jest, that if they took all our guns (if they even could), murderers would still get them. And if, in an invented world, criminals couldn’t get guns, they would use knives. What are you going to do, outlaw knives?

And then, following a series of knife attacks in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan outlaws knives. He tweeted, “There is never a reason to carry a knife.” 

I can think of reasons. Like, if I’m going to a friend’s house to help cook. (I have better cooking knives than most of my friends.) I carry a knife with me when I travel, because I have to take care of most of my own food because of allergies. If I were going to do a project at a charity that required opening boxes, I’d consider bringing my own box cutter. If I were going fishing, I’d carry a knife for gutting the fish. If I went shopping and found an excellent cooking knife, I’d need to carry that home. So, those are all logical and common reasons to carry a knife. But, being who I am, no one around me would be less safe because of my carrying a knife.

Oh, one more reason: if you’re living in a city where they’re having a spate of knife attacks, and you weren’t allowed to carry a gun, you’d want a knife for self-defense.

Remember that moment from the movie Crocodile Dundee, when he’s in New York and some thug mugs them at knife point? And Dundee says, “You call that a knife?” And then he pulls out his own, bigger near-machete, and the thug runs off. No one is injured. No one is robbed. That’s what non-criminals can do with a weapon. It’s not the weapon that is the problem; it’s the person wielding it. And if it’s a bad guy, you need a way to defend yourself.

Back to that First Amendment. We’ve been listening to Senate hearings with Mark Zuckerberg, about Facebook’s use of private information, and about its policies to prevent conservative messages from getting through.

In his questioning of Zuckerberg, Senator Ted Cruz asked him about purposeful and routine suppression of conservative ideas from trending stories. And he listed CPAC, Mitt Romney, Lois Lerner and the IRS scandal, Glenn Beck, Chick-Fil-A Customer Appreciation Day page, a Fox News reporter’s page, more than two dozen Catholic pages, and Diamond and Silk’s page (two sisters, black, who support Pres. Trump). Diamond and Silk were told their content—which is clean and pro-American—is dangerous to the community.

Cruz went on to ask if he was aware of any suppression of stories for Planned Parenthood, MoveOn.org, or any Democratic candidate’s page. 

Zuckerberg claimed to be unaware of any of these. He claimed his personal goal was to have a free place for all these ideas—with exceptions we can all agree on such as terrorism, self-harm, or human trafficking. I want to believe him. But, if his company is doing this censoring, he’s responsible whether he’s personally aware of it or not.

In Cruz’s list was the IRS targeting. I got an update email this week from Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, which trained me in poll watching here in Houston. She brought us up to date on recent results. Besides the nonprofit being held up illegally by the IRS—even though it was what ought to be considered politically neutral, in favor of free and fair elections—her personal business was targeted by the FBI and multiple other agencies, preventing her and her family from making a living. This week things were supposed to have been settled finally. But the result has been essentially nothing. No one is held accountable. And anyone in those organizations just got carte blanche to target anyone they want in the future. And we’re left wondering what good it does to oust a corrupt regime if the new regime is too timid to stand up.

Senator Ben Sasse, in his questioning of Zuckerberg, asked about the definition of hate speech, which Zuckerberg was hard pressed to define. There are large categories we can agree on, such as calling for violence. But Senator Sasse was more concerned about the “psychological categories.” 

Sasse: “You use language of safety and protection earlier. We see this happening on college campuses all across the country. It’s dangerous. 40% of Americans under age 35 tell pollsters they think the First Amendment is dangerous, because you might use your freedom to say something that hurts somebody else’s feelings.

Those are frightening and discouraging statistics.

YouTube is another supposedly neutral online platform—i.e., a non-news site, accepting all views (with the exceptions of those terrorist, violent, or other illegal activities we already agree on)—that has been censoring content based on political leanings. PragerU is involved in a lawsuit because YouTube deemed a number of their short information videos “unsafe for the community.” No profanity. No sketchy images. Nothing that couldn’t safely be watched by a 10-year-old. There seemed to be no standard by which certain videos were disallowed, so there was no way to “correct,” if there had been errors. But in the end, it looks like they were censored for having conservative political views.

Conservative comedians Steven Crowder and Owen Benjamin have been YouTube censored for much the same reasons. Owen Benjamin was on with Andrew Klavan today, and he quoted comedian George Carlin as saying, “Political correctness is fascism disguised as politeness.”

Fascism is statist tyranny. Snowflakes worried about hurt feelings need to get a clue: they’re line of thinking is what led to millions of people being killed by their own governments in the last century. But, then, I also read this today:

According to a new survey released on Thursday by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, fully 41 percent of Americans don’t know what Auschwitz was, including two-thirds of Millennials. Approximately 22 percent of Millennials had not heard of the Holocaust, and 41 percent of Millennials thought 2 million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

Ignorance is probably the result of “political correctness,” or, if you will, fascism, running amok in our education system. But it’s no excuse. We don’t have to get along with people who want to tyrannize us; we just need to stand up to the bullies. And educate them if there’s any openness in their minds to allow for it.

Why were those first Ten Amendments put in the Constitution? Because the founders had the foresight to envision a time such as ours, when people have forgotten what was supposed to be self-evident.