With Facebook’s announcement that it will continue to suspend former President Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts for the foreseeable future, it seems that a few educated Liberals on the West Coast are determining what we can and cannot read. The determination was made based on what Facebook and apparently this oversight panel felt were incendiary comments during the Capitol riots on January 6th.
Before I go on I will be upfront about one very important thing, I am not on Facebook, never have been and probably never will be. It has nothing to do with their determining what can be posted and what can be blocked. It is just a personal preference about privacy and my feelings toward the amount of time I spend on the Internet already, I don’t need to spend an additional two hours of my day keeping up to date on people I can’t even remember.
Back to the matter at hand. Facebook has become one of the most powerful institutions in the World because it offers something that no other platform has been able to offer effectively, the ability to connect and express who you are in a way that you control. It serves a function for billions of people and has been able to monetize these connections in a way that doesn’t totally take away from the experience. Users have allowed Facebook to become an integral part of their lives and that integration has helped their voices to be heard and their ideas to spread. Theoretically, those voices should be allowed to say what they want to say as long as it doesn’t defame someone or have some liable-less content. Pretty much, everything else should be fair game.
Not so fast.
Right-wing conspiracy theorists have been blocked, ultra-Conservative members have been blocked and a host of non-politically correct actors have been either blocked or suspended. Whatever happened to the free flowing repository of ideas? Gone. Whatever happened to peoples right to free speech? Gone. It seems that if you don’t agree with some set of principles that Facebook has yet to fully disclose, you will eventually be silenced.
Liberals, Democrats and the far left have never really wanted to listen to or care about what the rest of the country has to say. That was why Donald Trump won in 2016. Not because Hillary was one of the most unlikable people ever nominated, but because the center and right of this country were tired of the shenanigans in Washington and wanted someone to hear them. Trump used Twitter almost to the point of ad nauseam but it was effective in many respects. He was speaking directly through a left leaning platform and had millions of followers. He used Facebook and Instagram to a lesser extent but was still effective on those platforms as well. Like him or hate him, he knew how to use new technology to voice his opinion and all three platforms benefitted from it. Rather quickly after the riots in January, they all decided to shut President Trump down. He was no longer going to be President and they had hoped he would fade away without that access to his followers.
You have to look a little deeper into all of this and tell me that something doesn’t feel a little fishy. The Democrats have the White House, both houses of Congress and it appears that every large social media platform has an agenda that might be considered left leaning. To top all of that off, the vast majority of the media in this country is Liberal and pretty much “fair and balanced” reporting no longer exists.
I do have a counterpoint to all that I have said and it is simply this: Facebook is a business, it can run it’s business however it feels like and must accept the blowback, however it may come. You don’t like the fact that Facebook is hanging President Trump out to dry? Get off of it. Don’t use it. You don’t like the fact that every network continues to act as shills for the Liberal Democrats? Don’t watch. Disconnect from the cable companies that could possibly be even more liberal than the Networks themselves. The woke community voices outrage over nonsense almost everyday. It’s time for Non-Woke people to steal their playbook and do the same thing.
To be honest, I read the New York Times (Not for much longer) and I will occasionally watch CNN to see the viewpoints of others and I continually come away with the feeling that they voice opinions and those opinions are the only ones that matter. The pendulum has swung very far to the left but as you know from history, that pendulum always swings back.
Thank You for this account on how the left has taken or been given the ability to ruin what America was.
I used to like you