One example they present is from a firearm activist who posted one of the many widely circulated articles comparing modern gun control laws to past gun control laws such as those imposed by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany. Facebook removed that post and suspended the gun owner’s account informing him the content he posted, ‘doesn’t follow Facebook Community Standards.’

For what it’s worth, Whiteout Press has the very same banned article in our Timeless Section. It’s titled, ‘The Deadly Cost of Gun Control’ and it details the genocidal after-effects of gun control from a half dozen historical examples ranging from Hitler’s Germany to Cambodia to China and the Soviet Union. It probably shouldn’t be any surprise then that we at Whiteout Press had our Facebook account terminated last month, along with all our groups, pages and past posts. Readers will notice on the above-linked Whiteout Press article, the Facebook ‘Like’ button mysteriously vanished. Yes, they reached out and removed every ‘Like’ button on every Whiteout Press article they could.

Censoring the left

While it’s almost exclusively been America’s political right that’s been censored for the past 30 years, the country’s political left is finding out what it’s like. A recent report from ValueWalk.com contrasts the difference between free speech on Facebook and free speech on Twitter, ‘Users of both Facebook and Twitter have noticed a difference in the amount of raw, unfiltered talk of the shooting incident in Ferguson, MO between the social media platforms. The reason: one platform engages in unbridled censorship.’

The account quotes one news outlet’s research explaining, ‘According to a report in the Washington Post, the Twitter feed is not filtered by algorithms. When people you follow communicate a message, it is delivered into your Twitter stream in real time regardless of content, as one might expect. Not so for Facebook.’

The story quoted columnist Casey Johnson from Ars Technica describing how controversy-free his own Facebook wall is. “While I’ve been seeing the same political trending tags, my feed is mundane as usual: a couple is expecting a baby,” he describes, “A recreational softball team won a league championship. A few broader feel-good posts about actor Chris Pratt’s ice bucket challenge to raise awareness and money for ALS, another friend’s ice-bucket challenge, another friend’s ice-bucket challenge. In fact, way more about ice bucket challenges than Ferguson or any other news-making event.”

Facebook censoring the world

If Americans are upset over Facebook’s political censorship here in the US, they haven’t seen anything yet. Over the past year, the chorus calling on the social media giant to stop censoring its users’ free speech has gone global.

A report from Bloomberg News earlier this year detailed Facebook’s unusual release of statistics regarding official government requests to block content on its site. Surprisingly, India is at the top of the list with more government-requested Facebook black-outs than all other countries combined. India made 4,765 requests, with Turkey coming in second at 2,014. No other country had more than 200. While Germany, France, Israel and the UK are all on the list, the US and China are curiously absent all together.

India isn’t the only country using Facebook to silence political speech. A report from Demand Progress calls on everyone to ask Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s executives to stop censoring free speech in China. ‘A range of Facebook users, from political dissidents to technology bloggers, are reporting the sudden blocking of their pages,’ the announcement warns, ‘Facebook provided no prior warning, nor was there a clear process established to restore access to the blocked pages.’

The call to action goes on to say, ‘More than 50 blocked pages were political in nature, and several users have had their pages maliciously blocked through fraudulent claims of intellectual property violations. This news follows Facebook’s disturbing assertions that it’s willing to work with government censors in places like China, and that the company is worried that it sometimes provides “too much” free speech.’

One final personal experience comes from Whiteout Press’ sister publication Opposition News. It’s also written and published by Whiteout Press’ own Mark Wachtler and demonstrates a major difference between Facebook and Twitter regarding free speech. OppositionNews.org streams the news feeds from all 15 of America’s opposition parties on its home page, such as the Libertarians, Greens, Constitution, PSL, etc. But it also streams the news feeds of all 50 state affiliates of each of America’s 15 most active opposition political parties. Often, the grassroots groups don’t have a news feed, or even a website. But they all have social media accounts. When it came time to choose which one to stream on Opposition News, Twitter was the winner. Why? Because Facebook doesn’t even allow it.