Groups are calling on Facebook to police content: why does Facebook care?
This past week we learned that many of the big corporate advertisers on Facebook have pulled their ads citing the social media platform’s failure to filter out racist “hate speech”. The suspensions come after calls from advocacy groups to bring pressure on the social media giant. The list of companies is growing.
Ford has now enacted a thirty-day suspension of advertising on Facebook and is calling on other big corporate sponsors to do the same. Companies such as Unilever and Starbucks have already joined the boycott, with several others voicing approval and indicating that they too may soon follow suit. A spokesperson for Ford stated that the company wanted Facebook to do a better job of “cleaning up” the “ecosystem” of social media.
In today’s woke cancel culture, pressure will no doubt mount quickly on companies that continue to advertise on Facebook as “complicit in bigotry” and the whole cynical and hypocritical process of public virtue signaling by companies who are really only worried about the effect all of this will have on profits will commence, building into an avalanche.
All of this was on my mind the other day when a post of mine on Facebook was disallowed on the grounds that it violated Facebook’s “community standards.” I had posted a picture of myself smoking a pipe after a hard day of farm work wherein I made the observation that my attire was filthy and I probably smelled, but given my relative isolation from polite society that “I.Don’t.Care.” This was my offense against community standards.
Now, I’m not sure about this, but I strongly suspect my offense was in mimicking the popular style: Black.Lives.Matter. Facebook allowed the post as soon as I changed the offending phrase to a simple “I don’t care” the post was allowed.
The thing is: I do, in fact, support the idea that Black Lives Matter and have said so in this column. I’ve been vocal about the systemic racism in this country. I’ve welcomed the movement to extricate it as long overdue. That typing those words with a particular punch should be preemptively excluded from the Facebook public forum is—pardon the hifalutin’ argot—bonkers.
The ham-fisted digital automata tasked with the guardianship of the New Orthodoxy are bound to conduct their offices in a way that would make Torquemada blush.
Let this be abundantly clear: I wasn’t “censored” by some woke Morlock practicing deliberate “viewpoint discrimination” on me from Zuckerberg’s basement. I’m pretty sure Facebook isn’t in cahoots with George Soros, the illuminati, the Jesuits, and the “forced vaccination” crowd. I highly doubt that Facebook’s headquarters are like Dr. Evil’s lair, sitting under a volcano somewhere in the Pacific plotting the demise of civilization as we know it. The truth is far less dramatic (and entertaining) than that: an algorithm did this to my post.
Proximately considered, I was on the receiving end of nothing more nefarious than the porn filters in schools that also block out information on breast cancer and cougars.
That doesn’t make my spanking from Facebook’s digital conscience more tolerable. It kicks the can. Even if this rejection of my post was the result of an overzealous piece of clankering hardware, its origins are ultimately in someone at Facebook who is in charge of such things.
Even if Facebook’s motives are mostly pecuniary, the question remains: why is Facebook more afraid of consumer and corporate reprisal from the ranks of the woke than from the hundreds of millions of Facebook users who use the platform mainly as a venue for posting pictures of their cats and other such aspects of daily life?
One wonders whether Facebook’s fears are not precisely rooted in their perception of woke culture as cancel culture. If corporate America is now going to throw its massive financial weight behind such purges of the impure, one then wonders what is to stand in the way of an inquisitorial crushing of heretical thinking ?
The ham-fisted digital automata tasked with the guardianship of the New Orthodoxy are bound to conduct their offices in a way that would make Torquemada blush.
Error has no rights. That is most certainly true. Persons do have rights, though—even persons who are in error—and such an affirmation is the very root of the notion of the modern Liberal project’s historic latitude toward free speech. That latitude, perhaps now even more than the alt-right yahoos with a keyboard, is under attack.
Right or wrong, the Church has embraced this aspect of the modern Liberal project, insofar as freedom from restriction on speech is concerned—and I have more than a sneaking suspicion that her wisdom will again be proved, as the degenerate forces of woke capital and ideological commitment continue to give their voracious appetites ever greater liberty to range.
I might be reading into this situation more than is really there. But I think not. I do not want to be an “alarmist” here, exaggerating the dangers at hand. There is, nevertheless, reason for alarm.
Larry Chapp, PhD taught theology at DeSales University for 19 years. He now runs the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm with his wife, Carrie, near Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
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