Banning artists, censoring their expression, whatever it may happen to entail – is such an unsavory, not to mention slippery slope in any democracy, post WW2 – that pretty much every one of those democracies won’t even make the mistake of trying to do it.
But we have been repeatedly told that Facebook and other Big Tech US giants are not democracies – they are in fact just private companies, that happen to dominate, wholesale, the market in their own country, and often around the world.
Even if this may, to all intents and purposes, make them into “states within a state” with no legal liability when it comes to free speech – can they really in reality just continue to act as they please and ignore any local law?
Such as, for example, the First Amendment – which is the way the US guarantees freedom of speech. To all its citizens that is – and ostensibly, extending even to the undeniable dominant market force, Facebook, and its many users.
But now, here’s this: US political cartoonist and former Marvel artist Mike Harris has published a cartoon, seemingly laboring to equate arguments in favor of the right to abortion to those of Nazi German extermination policies – and did this on Facebook, among other places.
Bounding into Comics has a detailed report, complete with the artwork itself.
The cartoon was originally published by American Thinker on May 17.
It’s hard to assess from the report what exactly triggered the Facebook censor: the Nazi insignia itself, or the subject of abortion?
But Bounding into Comics said that artificial intelligence tools had been ruled out as the arbiter since other Facebook users who shared this cartoon had not faced any kind of censorship.
Either way: Facebook, as a publishing platform for an artist, ended up with having the artist getting swiftly censored. But only for three days. And when Harris reposted the art on his own personal Facebook account – along with some commentary – he again got banned – for three days. This time along with a threat of a permanent ban looming over him, according to the report.
