Facebook’s censorship efforts seem to be growing ever more trigger-happy and contradictory, perhaps even chaotic, as the next US presidential election approaches, and the various hopefuls’ campaigns heat up.
Prominent among those campaigns – at least if the metric is the amount of media noise she generates – is Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has clearly identified and then doubled down on a multitude of serious Big Tech issues as that profitable campaign cause to latch onto.
Fox News is now reporting about a case of Facebook apparently overreacting to any possibility of being seen as anti-Warren – only to then have to admit that it had been an overreaction.
The report said that Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson is the one who was in this instance forced to bear the brunt of Facebook’s overzealous attempts to moderate its platform. Jacobson has his own wiki website (elizabethwarrenwiki.org) – detailing what he thinks is relevant information about Warren as a leading political figure and her bid for the highest political office.
Among the things Jacobson documented are her bogus at worst and irrelevant at best claims pertaining to her ethnic background – namely, Warren seems to have reached for her non-existent “Native American heritage.”
What Jacobson decided to reach for was Facebook. According to what he told Fox News, he thought this was “a way of getting the content out to the public.”
But Facebook soon acted to dissuade him of this idea, when they notified the professor his page had been removed “for violating Facebook’s policies regarding impersonation.”
Jacobson, however, argued that this was a false charge, considering that his page was clearly identified as what it was – in no way affiliated with Warren, and posting legal disclaimers along the way to establish and prove this status.
Eventually, Facebook recognized the error of its decision and restored Jacobson’s page, saying the original action to ban it was a mistake.
Before his Facebook page was put back up, Jacobson speculated why it might have come under such scrutiny in the first place. One possibility was the in-fighting between Democratic candidates.
“All I know is the last couple of days there was a Twitter war between Bernie (Sanders) and Warren supporters, and Bernie’s supporters were linking to the wiki website. It might be pure coincidence or it might be that someone decided to complain to Facebook about the page,” said Jacobson.
All this is happening amid Warren’s ongoing election campaign “war” against Big Tech – to which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently reacted in leaked comments by saying, among other things:
“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies… I mean, if she gets elected president then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge.”
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