I just finished up my second Facebook ban, this one for seven days. So I’m out. The next one would probably be for 30 days, and there’s no point in using a communications network where you could be switched off at any time and have no way even to tell people why you aren’t responding. I had quit the site a couple years ago, and was happy with that. I started using my account again last year just to get to a private group of an organization I was part of. But FB has decided I’m a Nazi whose opinion should be suppressed, so I won’t be giving them any more content. If my FB friends want to follow my blog and videos, they’ll have to check the RSS feed here (your browser or app should know what to do with it) or subscribe to my Bitchute and YouTube channels (and the YouTube ones might go away any time for the same reasons). It’s inconvenient, but that’s where we are. Convenience or freedom: pick one.

Both bans were for politically incorrect memes posted to the private group. FB says they were for violating community guidelines, but that doesn’t even make sense in a private group, so it’s a lie. It’s simply a gradual purge of any opinions that would offend the average gender-studies graduate, and they’re ramping it up for the 2020 election, so it’s happening to more people all the time. That was obviously the plan since 2016, but they’re speeding it up now that they’re finally coming under the scrutiny of the FTC and DoJ. They always double-down.

FB could pull its head out of its ass and go back to the benign neglect of pre-2016, when they blocked truly offensive/illegal content and let people make their own decisions about the rest using the tools they provide to hide and ignore people and posts. But that’s not going to happen. The owners of FB, Google, Twitter, and the rest of the Big Tech, Big Social gang are not Americans. Some are technically American citizens, but they don’t think of themselves as part of the American nation and they have no respect for American culture, law, or the Constitution. They see themselves as citizens of a global, supra-national techno-state, and their loyalty is to themselves and their fellow technocrats. They have more money than they can figure out how to spend, so they reckon they can afford to lose some by cutting loose the right-wing and conservative portion of their user base. They expect to gain more than enough to offset those losses by the gains from their global and foreign investments, as long as they can suppress American patriots and get the White House back in 2020. They’ll gladly lose money on their bottom lines for that goal.

So they won’t back down voluntarily. There are a couple ways the feds could bring them to heel, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out now that they’re starting to do their jobs again. I’ve talked about some of this before in podcasts, but the bad thing about podcasts is they’re hard to search, so I don’t remember exactly what I said. Maybe I’ll do some new ones to get up to date. In short: one option would be to apply Marsh v. Alabama, which says private corporations which provide a space for free public use have to respect constitutional rights in that space. Another option is to call them on the publisher/carrier game they’ve been playing. They claim to have no legal liability for the content they carry because they’re just carriers. For instance, if a group of people use FB to arrange to rob you, you can’t sue FB as a conspirator, just as you can’t sue the phone company if they plan it over the phone. But by censoring speech over offensive opinions, they act as publishers who are responsible for what users see on their system. They’ve had this both ways, and that can be stopped. They can be forced to go back to acting like carriers, as I said above, or they can be treated as publishers who can be charged and sued over any piece of content they allow, which would entirely destroy them.

We’ll see what happens. They may also be broken up under anti-trust law for monopolistic practices and other illegalities, but I don’t know much about that, and that doesn’t seem like it would address the problem as directly. It could break their dominance over the social media space and allow competitors without a political ax to grind to get a foothold, though.