Facebook Begins Punishing Users For Daring To Use Their Free Speech

Social media giant Facebook has just announced its new and controversial policy regarding free speech. Hidden under the buzzwords “fake news,” Facebook will begin to punish those who share articles they dub as “fake.”

How dare a person use their social media account to speak their mind! Since the dawn of the “fake news” era, anyone who doesn’t like a news story or an article calls it “fake” immediately as if that gives them some sort of moral high ground. Well, have no fear, because now Facebook will save you from all those pesky articles you just don’t like.

Free speech is such a burden that now, pages that post stories on Facebook that the social media giant disapproves of will now be banned from advertising on the social network, marking the latest move in the “ongoing battle to quell fake news.” Social media is only for pictures of cats and your dinner, and those daily selfies. Don’t you dare try to bring attention to government corruption, or Facebook will punish you.

A Facebook blog post said the move targets “instances of Pages using Facebook ads to build their audiences in order to distribute false news more broadly. Fake news is “an endemic problem across a whole ecosystem so there is no silver bullet here, but it will contribute toward making it harder for people to exploit the system,” David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the New School, said. –NBC News

Although Facebook is unlikely to punish CNN, a media outlet who admitted to pushing fake news for profits, this will likely come down to whether or not those working for the social media giant determine the news to be favorable to their own political ideology; which is definitely censorship and a silencing of dissenters. So much for that first amendment thing and all that freedom we supposedly have.  If censors and those who sputter “fake news” the second something shows up on their newsfeed that they don’t like are so convinced that their ideology is the correct one, why do dissenters need to be punished? It’s a fair question, and the answer is more simple than one can imagine…

Censorship and punishments for saying things that the authorities deem unacceptable are the cornerstones of every totalitarian regime that has ever existed.

Spreading fake news is of course a profitable business. Many pages have used advertisements to build their audience. When people click on their fake stories, those fake news purveyors can then make money off their readership by running ads on their sites. Facebook and Google do not allow fake news sites to use their advertising platforms. –NBC News

But the government and the mainstream media are the biggest culprits when it comes to the spreading of fake news.

There’s the garden variety fake news that is not really “news” so much as it is titillating, tabloid-worthy material peddled by anyone with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an active imagination.

Anyone with an ounce of sense and access to the Internet should be able to ferret out the truth and lies in these stories with some basic research. That these stories flourish is largely owing to the general gullibility, laziness and media illiteracy of the general public, which through its learned compliance rarely questions, challenges or confronts.

Then there’s the more devious kind of news stories circulated by one of the biggest propagators of fake news: the U.S. government.

In the midst of the media’s sudden headline-blaring apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works. –The Rutheford Institute

Facebook’s fears of free speech prove they’ve further aligned with fascism.

Indeed, the New York Times has suggested that Facebook and Google appoint themselves the arbiters of truth on the internet in order to screen out what is blatantly false, spam or click-baity.

Not only would this establish a dangerous precedent for all-out censorship but it’s also a slick sleight-of-hand maneuver that diverts attention from what we should really be talking about: the fact that the government has grown dangerously out-of-control, all the while the so-called mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation—the U.S. government.  –The Rutheford Institute

Censorship: the totalitarian’s best friend.