Why did Facebook censor the New York Post's article on BLM founder's home-buying spree?
The company claims the article goes against its "community standards."
The censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election by Big Tech social media companies like Facebook and Twitter marked a significant turning point in the relationship between Big Tech and democracy.
Social media companies, fearful of regulation from the Democrats who were about to take control of the government in Washington, seemed to collude to suppress a story that would’ve reflected poorly on the family of the Democratic candidate for president.
It was an awesome display of the raw power of these unelected, unaccountable companies. They effectively intervened in the U.S. presidential election in favor of one candidate by limiting public discussion about an unflattering news story.
Now, it appears that Facebook is once again putting its thumb on the scale, and it has to do with another New York Post article. Users worldwide are reporting that they can’t share a New York Post story about a Black Lives Matter co-founder buying several real estate properties, including a $1.4 million California home, on any of Facebook’s services (Facebook’s social network, Instagram, and Messenger all appear to be impacted):
The issue appears to be impacting users globally. When users of the service attempt to share a link to the New York Post’s story, they are met with an error message indicating that the link goes against Facebook’s “community standards.”
We’ll update this story as we learn more.
Update:
New York Times media columnist Ben Smith received the following response from Facebook claiming that the New York Post article revealed personal details about the article’s subject and her residence in violation of Facebook’s community standards:
As Smith notes, if this was truly a policy that Facebook applied routinely and uniformly, a significant percentage of news on the internet would be disqualified from being posted and shared on Facebook’s platforms.
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Thank you for the informative write-up. I’m disturbed though by your bold assertion that social media companies “seemed to collude” in withdrawing the NYP Hunter Biden article. Even with the “seemed” hedge, that’s an extraordinary claim and should require extraordinary evidence. You don’t provide any. I know the Hunter Biden article isn’t your write-up’s subject. But you can critique the decisions of social media platforms without casually dropping evidence-free theories of how decisions were made. It hurts your overall argument.
Subscribing to this was practically automatic for me, my credit card was in my hand before I finished reading the announcement. Should contribute significantly to my mental health because I will be able to read your writing far away from the minefield of Twitter--where your two profiles were always my first two stops anyway! Which makes me wonder...if I need to check Twitter anymore at all? :)