June 26, 2012
Meanwhile, according to one investigation, Facebook is pretty blasé about hosting child-porn “trading circles,” despite complaints to the FBI and (what should have been) embarrassing, worldwide pre-IPO public exposure.
Then last week, Facebook took down one member’s photos of her post-mastectomy chest, deeming them “pornographic.”
Facebook is a huge company, so maybe it’s peevish to bitch that their employees can”t keep their ambiguous “standards” straight. In fact, such complaints miss the entire point.
The company’s youthful corporate culture couldn”t be anything else but adamantly pro-gay and irreverently anti-Christian. As John Derbyshire notes, the twenty- and thirtysomethings running much of the media and the Internet “have no idea” that a worldview other than their own exists”or should be permitted to exist.
Mark Steyn adds:
I long ago lost count of the number of places, from the Toronto Airport to Marriott hotels, that have SteynOnline blocked as a “hate” site.
Oddly enough, jihadist networks calling for death and the destruction of western civilization, including the crappy Marriott round the back of the airport, never seem to fall into the “hate” category.
The real problem isn”t Facebook’s drunken lurching between censorship and freedom (while insisting, like every blotto college boy, that they”re “totally not drunk, dude” and it’s the rest of us who need to “chill”).
The problem is that there is only one Facebook.
That’s worrisome because: a) Facebook may be dead within the decade, and b) even if it survives, its “progressive” culture will become more entrenched as younger and even more brainwashed hipsters get their key cards to the Palo Alto campus.
I”ve been a chorus of (almost) one making the unpopular argument that conservatives and libertarians do not need yet another news site or opinion aggregator to compete in an increasingly redundant marketplace already crowded with Townhalls and DailyCallers and NewsMaxes and their dozens of imitators.
Had Andrew Breitbart truly been a visionary, he”d have invested in free-speech-friendly versions of Facebook, Blogger, and WordPress, which regularly shut down “right-wing” blogs when leftists file complaints.
(Kudos to the venerable Media Research Center for launching MRCTV, a much-needed alternative to the equally arbitrary and censorious YouTube.)
Google, Twitter, and other social-media giants are widely touted as “revolutionary” tools being used to organize and promote popular uprisings the world over.
The “alternative media” that thousands of conservative and libertarian bloggers and videographers are so proud of has been built on somebody else’s property. We can be evicted, without warning or reason, at any time.
Leaving aside the dubious nature of most of these “popular uprisings,” remember that these tools belong to powerful people who are not like us and who don”t like us.
