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This is where we have arrived at.
Judge,
jury & executioner: Facebook policy permits death threats against
‘dangerous individuals’
RT,
10
July, 2019
Facebook
has issued an ominous new policy permitting death threats and calls
for violence – so long as they’re directed against “dangerous”
individuals or organizations, or someone accused (but not convicted)
of a crime.
Facebook
has updated its “community standards” to carve out a few
exceptions to its “no death threats” policy. Calls for
“high-severity violence” are now permitted, as long as they’re
directed at individuals “covered in the Dangerous Individuals and
Organizations policy” or individuals “described as having carried
out violent crimes or sexual offenses” by media reports. After all,
are people banned from Facebook really people at all?
The
change was spotted on Tuesday by commentator Paul Joseph Watson, who
along with his former Infowars boss Alex Jones was one of a handful
of mostly-conservative personalities banned from Facebook in May
under its “Dangerous Individuals” policy. Back then, even
mentioning one of the banned names could get a user banned – unless
the mention was derogatory.
Facebook
has apparently taken that “hate the haters” tactic and run with
it. While the “Dangerous Individuals” policy supposedly only
covers “terrorist activity, organized hate, mass or serial murder,
human trafficking, and organized violence or criminal activity,”
none of the commentators banned - including Watson, Jones,
conservative political performance artist Milo Yiannopoulos, and
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan – were involved in any of
those activities. But, Watson discovered, a person wearing an
Infowars t-shirt is enough to get a photo removed from Instagram, and
photos that include banned individuals - even if their faces are
blurred out - have been deleted as well.
Equally
ominous is Facebook’s decision to dispense with the concept of
“innocent until proven guilty” that forms the core of the US
legal system (Facebook is based in Menlo Park, California, and at
least theoretically subject to US laws). Individuals need only be
accused in the media of violent crimes and sexual offenses to become
fair game for death threats – not convicted in court. For a company
that claims to take the threat of “fake news” very seriously,
Facebook is surprisingly cavalier about the potential for media
misinformation to lead to violence.
But
then, Facebook never even tried to prove Watson, Jones or any of the
other banned users were “Dangerous Individuals,” either – its
policy has always been that banned users are guilty until proven
innocent, as any user who’s ever been forced to jump through its
tech support hoops to restore a banned account can attest.
“The
largest social media company in the world with over 2 billion users
literally says it’s fine to incite violence against me, despite
this being illegal,” Watson wrote at Summit.news, pointing out that
sending death threats or threats of violence is, in fact, a crime
under UK law (as it is under US law and the laws of most developed
countries with substantial Facebook-using populations).
They
are painting a target on my back.
Facebook
even tracks off-platform behavior to determine whether users should
be blacklisted as “hate agents,” according to internal documents
seen by Breitbart, meaning merely showing up at the same event as a
“dangerous individual” can potentially earn a user the
designation. The site’s list of “hate agents” is reportedly
quite exhaustive and includes British politicians Carl Benjamin and
Anne Marie Waters as well as conservative commentators like
Yiannopoulos and Candace Owens. Because all this classification goes
on in secret, users have no chance to appeal their un-personing, and
may never even know they are being judged, until they start receiving
Facebook-approved death threats of their own.
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