Facebook is getting slammed for twice removing transfeminine rapper Michete’s post expressing solidarity with the Orlando massacre victims. The post was shared thousands of times on the network until Facebook abruptly deleted it. The company also banned the rapper from the network and sent him a notification that bafflingly included a warning about transmitting underage porn.
Then, Michete says, Facebook banned him from using the social network for 24 hours after the second post.
Facebook also allegedly blocked him from using the Facebook Messenger app for 72 hours. Michete sent us a notification he received by Facebook that included the lines: “In many countries, it’s illegal to make, share or knowingly have images of anyone under the age of 18 involved in sexually explicit acts or behavior. This includes nudity.”
“There are rape jokes and death threats and neo-Nazi groups that exist on Facebook,” Michete said in an interview with Gizmodo. “I don’t understand that double standard. There are a lot of things that get reported that never get taken down.”
If you want 5 corporations to own everything on the Internet, you’re going to have to put up with censorship.
If you want to join the Internet and interact and share and ingest content and not pay for any of it, you’re going to have to put up with advertisements and a total lack of privacy of your data owned by that corporation
If you want to have free-speech (within what’s legal, i.e. not pro-terrorism posts about ISIS or sharing child pornography), you’ll have to buy your own web-server and start a blog. Heck, depending on what country your server is located and what country TLD you choose for your domain name, you can talk about anything you want. (Just look at how Pirate Bay has avoided being completely shut-down).
Blogging is dead until you have something you want to say that’s really important that might upset some people. Then, a blog is the only free-speech medium (not THAT medium) you have.
It’s a shame that this person’s opinion was removed from Facebook (twice) and they were banned from logging into Facebook. The company says the whole thing was done in error. Yeah, right. Remember, you are not Facebook’s Customer. The advertisers are. They run the show, you’re just a set of eye-balls there to click ads.