It’s the new sign on the door . . the rebooting of the covenants in real estate contracts forbidding sale or transfer to certain people.
Just different people, today.
And different ideas, too.
The other day, news broke that Facebook will henceforth be applying racist policies - which they style more "nuanced" - to the race it’s becoming acceptable to second-class. White people. It’s ok to call them “stupid” and “pigs” - some of the specific examples cited by news coverage of Facebook’s allowable slurs - but you’ll get Zucked - i.e., your posts scrubbed, your account cancelled - if you post anything critical of such slurs being indulged.
That being the new “racism,”in the eyes of Facebook - as well as the other tentacles of the Big Tech/Social Media Octopus, Google and its YouTube video-clip subsidiary - which are so emboldened by their successful intimidation tactics - their electronic lynching of all who oppose them - that they aren’t even trying to hide their cognitively dissonant ku-kluxing anymore.
According to a recent article in USA Today, Facebook released a statement that “ . . . its automated moderation systems are being retrained to focus on hate speech targeting historically marginalized and oppressed groups...”
Which the statement then asserted “can be the most harmful.”
In plainer words, Facebook will decide what constitutes “hate speech” according to its definition of “historically marginalized and oppressed groups” - and never mind the harm imposed on specific individuals.
It is a dogma of the new racists that we are all identities - a function of skin color and sex - not individuals. To be protected - or punished - not on the basis of who we are but which group we are assigned to. This is the way Facebook and the Tech Oligarchy will combat the groupthink that is the core tenet of racism.
“We have focused our technology on finding the hate speech that users and experts tell us is the most serious,” says Facebook spokeswoman Sally Aldous.
But who are these “users” and “experts”? Are they the same imperiously anonymous “fact checkers” Facebook uses to suppress speech it disagrees with? There is a star chamber quality to this business of not knowing who accuses - and no meaningful way to appeal the accusations.
The mere accusation being sufficient to get Zucked.
Facebook and the Tech Oligarchs de-platform, shadow-ban and cancel at their whim - perhaps accompanied by an opaque notice that “community standards” have been violated, with no mention of how, precisely.
The USA Today piece goes on to explain that FB is merely atoning for its “systemic racism” - a bizarro inversion of fact given the systemic application by Facebook of specifically racist policies that indulge attacks on whites - as a group and as individuals, as by regarding any criticism of the Black Lives Matter for its Marxist undertones and leadership as well as its violent tactics (all facts, not assertions) as evidence of anti-black animus and “hateful.”
Facebook claims it is merely trying to level the playing field by doing to whites what it says has been done to blacks. One example of this being the Zucking of a post made by a teacher in Richmond, CA named Carolyn Wysinger about the "fragility" of white people and that "the mere presence of a black person challenges everything in them."
This post was taken down for violating FB's "community guidelines," accompanied by a threat of a permanent ban if she posted something similarly "hateful" again.
Of course this is preposterous - a hysterical over-reaction to over-sensitivity, which will be the death knell of the open give-and-take conversation which must exist in a free society, if it is to remain free.
But it is equally preposterous for Facebook (and USA Today) to argue that an exactly similar post with one word changed - substitute the "fragility of black people for white - would have been met with a less hysterical over-reaction.
In fact, there is rarely any reaction - even in egregious cases such as the serially racist (toward critics of racism) Al Sharpton and the "Honorable" Louis Farrakhan, whose posts seem to never violate "community standards."
Meanwhile, better not post a picture of the Confederate monument you visited while touring the Gettysburg battlefield.
But the core problem isn't one-sided hypersensitivity.
It is the suffocating power to decide what is - and is not - permissible speech in the public square. Facebook and the Tech Oligarchs have acquired a near-monopoly hold on that public square and that obliges them to be neutral rather than "nuanced" as regards what may be posted in the public square.
To permit them the power to pick and choose what is acceptable is to grant them control over the public square - and that is far more a threat to this country than a "hateful" post.
