Facebook is censoring our views – and this is feeding extremism

The revelation that Facebook have been censoring news stories they don’t agree with is seriously worrying. A seventh of the world’s population use Facebook, which means over a billion people are exposed to the sort of Lefty liberalism the social network seems to like. A wise man once said “with great power comes great responsibility”, but Facebook obviously dislikes this axiom, preferring instead to throw it in the bin along with free speech.

Of course the left will be ecstatic, lauding Facebook for weeding out all the bigots and hatemongers, from moderate right-wingers to neo-Nazis. They’ll praise the company for making their website a “safe space” before demanding they implement a trigger-warning system to protect their infantilised hordes from the real world.

Unfortunately this sort of censoriousness seems to be in vogue and encapsulated by no-platform policies across universities worldwide. Unsurprisingly, alongside Facebook, Twitter now polices their feeds in deference to this new insidious zeitgeist. Nick Pickles, Twitter’s UK Head of Policy, has said that the web has helped to make “challenging, even upsetting viewpoints… more visible” in a way that is “not always comfortable”. Twitter, once describing itself as ‘the free-speech wing of the free speech party’, now acquiesces to the demands of a mollycoddled generation of politically-correct online crusaders. Like fragile flowers they collapse at the merest hint of a contrary argument.

Even Angela Merkel’s in on it. The German Chancellor was overheard last September asking Mark Zuckerberg what he could do to counteract offensive posts about the refugee crisis. In February the Facebook bigwig joyfully announced that Facebook were to clamp down on xenophobic posts. The doctrine of censorship is spreading, even to the highest of governmental levels.

Like the residents of a 1984 dystopia, advocates of this movement have an acute case of doublethink. On the one hand they’re fans of freedom. They, like most good people on this earth, are all for religious and sexual freedoms but when they turn to political freedom things turn a bit sour. Admittedly, politics is different in this regard because it can include views that wish to curb religious and sexual freedoms. Facebook and the liberals however fail to understand that those who espouse unpopular views have just as much a right to express them as anyone else, no matter how risible. That is true political freedom.

They fail to see, for instance, that freedom of speech has this amazing mechanism in which the most universally condemned of viewpoints just go away. If they’re unpopular that means no one’s going to listen, and if no one is listening they will fade into obscurity. It also has another essential function: the right to criticise. Facebook et al misunderstand this as the right to censor, probably because they haven’t got any good arguments. Angela Merkel does though. She has a good, humanitarian reason for opening Germany’s borders. Pandering to the puerile yelps of lily-livered liberals by censoring Facebook posts, however, seems a desperate step back.

Mark Zuckerberg has under his control the most influential medium in the entire world and is misusing it. Zuckerberg is an amiable kind of fellow, the kind of person you’d love to have a coffee with, but his brash disregard for right-wing views is insulting and disrespectful and his penchant for draconian censorship illustrates that even the most innovative and forward thinking of people can be afflicted with the liberal delusion. Like natural selection, reprehensible views, if they are universally regarded as being so, will largely disappear, so censorship is not needed.

The real danger is when Facebook include moderate right-wing views in their purge, views shared by a lot of good, decent people. Lumping these people in with white supremacists, homophobes, and racists not only fundamentally misunderstands their views but displays a level of ignorance similar to real extremists.