Facebook is in the tyranny and oppression business now, and business is good.
Remember how Donald Trump outraged America last year by leveling anti-fascists with fascists after the deadly Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.?
Facebook has taken his supremacist sentimentalism a step further by extending the same kind of false equivalency to Nazis and anti-Nazis online.
The embattled social media network unpublished The Cynical Times’ Facebook page last month for posting a meme making fun of a Trump supporter who flashed a Nazi salute. They also suspended the accounts of many of our volunteer editors for 30 days.
It took me a while to figure out why our non-partisan, anti-corruption news community was targeted because Facebook provides the masses with neither customer service nor due process. Meaning we don’t get our day in court, a chance to confront our accusers, the right to counsel, a jury by our peers, a telephone number to call, or even the vaguest shadow of due process.
Those traditional American rights apparently are only for the rich now.
Why?
Because Wall Street says so.
Not being rich, our pro-democracy news community was arbitrarily shut down. Without so much as a Miranda warning.
Facebook prefers the term “unpublished,” much as rapists prefer the term “partners.”
This shameful incident is the latest mile marker along the path of Facebook’s continuing death spiral.
The social media network started out as a force for good, which fanned the flames of freedom, before it became a publicly traded company in 2012. However, it’s been discreetly monetizing the freedoms of the masses and undermining democracy ever since.
I have to have five different Facebook accounts to share my articles now with the anti-Trump Facebook groups which favor my work. Even though the social media network originally billed itself as a facilitator of “citizen-journalism.”
It took me a while to filter all the messages coming into those five accounts after the automated shutdown. I was amazed and astonished when I finally figured out why they had closed us down.
The meme in question (right) was fairly good natured by social media standards. It didn’t call for Nazis to be censored, arrested or shot; didn’t mention that half my family died in the Holocaust; didn’t say that more than 1 million American soldiers were killed and wounded fighting the Nazis and their allies during World II; and didn’t mention that my father personally butchered Nazis as a combat soldier in General Patton’s Third Army.
It also didn’t mention that Pop’s oversized company of combat engineers started the War in Europe with 240 guys and finished with just 23 of its original members. Or that its members treated regular German prisoners and civilians with compassion, but habitually killed any and all concentration camp guards, SS stormtroopers and Nazi Party members they encountered.
All the meme did was ask “How many Trumplickers does it take to post a single coherent thought online?”
And answer with a pic of a Trumplicker holding up five fingers in a Nazi salute.
Apparently, even that sentiment is impermissable in the pro-Nazi world of The Moron Presidency. Where Nazi sympathizers now enjoy the same protections as the rest of us. Perhaps more.
The shutdown prompted Cynical to shift our Facebook presence into the Occupy News Service page we set up at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Before Facebook started growing its profits by selling the masses out.
Why do I have five different Facebook accounts?
Facebook suspends me every time I distribute links to my anti-Trump articles to the anti-Trump Facebook communities which want to read them.
It’s not that Facebook minds me writing for free. Hell they’ve been hijacking my byline stories from the mainstream news media for more than a decade now.
It’s just that Facebook is no longer content simply to steal from me now. They would also very much like me to pay them for stealing my stories by buying “boosts” that force my stories onto the newsfeed pages of readers, who may or may not want to see them. Instead of just allowing me to reach out to those who do on my own.
This is how Facebook opened the door to Russian meddling in the the 2016 election which gave us The Moron Presidency.
This is also how Facebook makes the rich first-class citizens online and relegates the rest of America to a seat in coach.
Those of us who understand what’s happening have the choice of quitting Facebook altogether and communicating with the rest of America via smoke signal.
Yeah, no, I don’t remember voting for that. Do you?
The good news is that when you get suspended you can always do absolutely nothing. Because there is neither American freedom nor American democracy on America’s online public forum.
It’s just like election time, when you can either vote for the Democratic Wall Street Cheerleader or the Republican Wall Street Cheerleader, but can never cast a ballot against Wall Street’s “profits over people” ethos.
Freedom, this ain’t.
