Facebook Threatens to Unperson Online Magazine
Jose Nino
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Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently accused online magazine Quillette of violating the Big Tech giant’s community standards, subsequently removing its monetization and threatening to delete its page, per a post from Quilette’s founder, Claire Lehmann.
“It would be helpful if Meta provided information on what ‘community violations’ Quillette has made,” declared Lehmann. “They don’t provide a single example, but just inform me that our page cannot be monetised & is at risk of deletion.”
On top of that, Lehmann noted that a support ticket has been filed with Meta, calling attention to how the company’s AI content moderation systems often automatically target material on its platforms.
Quillette, which was founded in 2015, has positioned itself as a center for academics and writers who deviated from the cultural left’s propensity towards censoring controversial ideas and engaging in petty racial politics.
“This should worry an extremely broad range of people on the left and right alike,” declared scholar Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame. In this book, which made many on the cultural Left go nuts, Murray drew a connection between race and intelligence.
“This isn’t about anything even approaching hate speech. It’s threatened suppression of measured, thoughtful speech that doesn’t track with the woke orthodoxy,” Murray added.
“It’s amazing that even after all of the global uproar surrounding corporate censorship and with the transition of Twitter to X under Elon Musk, that Meta and others continue to believe that heavy-handed, ideologically motivated silencing of heterodox ideas is desirable–at all,” declared Matthew Nielsen of the Educational Freedom institute.
Several Facebook page owners revealed that Meta had also subjected them to censorship with no explanation offered.
“My page was killed too. They said I had three months to appeal my suspension, which I did,” stated Joel Shepherd, a podcaster and author of science fiction books.
“A month after that, they said I had two months. Would I like to appeal? I said yes. A month later, I have one month to appeal, would I like to appeal? Etc. No explanation of what I supposedly did wrong, nothing.”
To be sure, Quilette has milquetoast centrist views. Nevertheless, in a polity that supports free speech, those type of views should be allowed to be disseminated. If we can’t stand up for those views, other dissident views will be put on the chopping block.
Big Tech is not an innocuous institution. Social media platforms are dedicated to destroying free speech these days. If they are not reined in through prudential statecraft, America could witness the wholesale destruction of civil liberties within our lifetime.
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