MORE CENSORSHIP: FACEBOOK UNPUBLISHES JIHAD WATCH PAGE
Dissent from the Leftist line and you will be silenced
BY ROBERT SPENCER
SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271465/more-censorship-facebook-unpublishes-jihad-watch-robert-spencer; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
It has long been obvious that Facebook is no friend of the freedom of speech, and is especially tough on foes of jihad terror and the massive Muslim migrant influx into the West, and so it was perhaps inevitable that this would happen. The Facebook fascists, of course, do their best to conceal what they’re about. This time they have shut down the Jihad Watch page on a technicality that is in reality a catch-22.
Facebook has been giving me notices on the Jihad Watch page saying that the page is unpublished, and will remain unpublished until I confirm what country I’m in. They want to guard against all those Russian bots, doncha know.
Confirming what country I’m in involves entering in a code they send to my phone, and the code never arrives. The Facebook page after they say they sent the code to me tells me to update the Facebook app. It doesn’t say anything more specific, but I’ve repeatedly downloaded the latest Facebook app, so it should be fully updated.
Confirming what country I’m in involves entering in a code they send to my phone, and the code never arrives. The Facebook page after they say they sent the code to me tells me to update the Facebook app. It doesn’t say anything more specific, but I’ve repeatedly downloaded the latest Facebook app, so it should be fully updated.
When I asked Facebook Help what to do, they said to enable Location Services. I enabled Location Services. The same thing happened. Page still unpublished.
I’ve been getting the notice to confirm my country location for a while, but the Jihad Watch was still updating with new Jihad Watch posts. Today, however, there is a new notice in WordPress, which I use for Jihad Watch, saying that before I publish a post, make sure I’m set up with Facebook. So all morning today I have tried to give Facebook the info it needs, but got the same thing again: they ask for a code that they never send.
Is Facebook closing down my site because it dislikes my political views? That seems to me to be blazingly obvious at this point. For this is by no means the first time that Facebook has moved against Jihad Watch. It has been over a year and a half since Facebook began to choke off the readership that Jihad Watch was receiving from Facebook: on February 7, 2017, referrals to my website Jihad Watch from Facebook numbered 23,783, and from Twitter, 1,718. These numbers were generally representative: referrals from Facebook for several years up to that point had averaged between 15,000 and 20,000 a day, and 1,500 to 2,000 a day from Twitter. But on February 10, 2017, those numbers dropped suddenly and precipitously, with only 2,923 referrals from Facebook and 295 from Twitter. That’s around where they have held since then: on March 20, 2017, there were 1,954 referrals from Facebook and 241 from Twitter.
Is Facebook closing down my site because it dislikes my political views? That seems to me to be blazingly obvious at this point. For this is by no means the first time that Facebook has moved against Jihad Watch. It has been over a year and a half since Facebook began to choke off the readership that Jihad Watch was receiving from Facebook: on February 7, 2017, referrals to my website Jihad Watch from Facebook numbered 23,783, and from Twitter, 1,718. These numbers were generally representative: referrals from Facebook for several years up to that point had averaged between 15,000 and 20,000 a day, and 1,500 to 2,000 a day from Twitter. But on February 10, 2017, those numbers dropped suddenly and precipitously, with only 2,923 referrals from Facebook and 295 from Twitter. That’s around where they have held since then: on March 20, 2017, there were 1,954 referrals from Facebook and 241 from Twitter.
Did thousands of people who used to click through to Jihad Watch articles from Facebook and Twitter suddenly lose interest on February 10, 2017? Of course not. What happened on that day was that Facebook and Twitter began to censor Jihad Watch as “hate speech,” in accordance with the assurances they had given to the European Union and to Pakistan: Facebook’s Vice President Joel Kaplan traveled to Pakistan in July 2017 to assure the Pakistani government that it would remove “anti-Islam” material. That is one job it has been doing consistently and with grim efficiency.
Now, I do not accept and will never accept the idea that reporting on jihad activity and Sharia oppression constitutes “hate speech.” But that is the longstanding claim of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and Muslim groups in the West, and it has been uncritically adopted by the Left, with which Facebook and Twitter are so firmly aligned.
This only underscored the necessity to boycott and disempower these social media platforms. If Facebook and Twitter and all the other social media giants shut out the truth, then we have to shut out the social media giants. Anti-trust legislation is urgently needed to break up these sinister monopolies, before the First Amendment becomes entirely a dead letter? Freedom of speech? Sure. As long as you toe the Leftist line.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
