Facebook Temporarily Suspends Hate Speech Policy to Allow for Calls of Violence Against Russians and Their Government
How Big Tech has been weaponized to achieve political outcomes
Facebook (now called “Meta Platforms”) recently announced that it would be temporarily suspending their hate speech policies to allow for calls of violence against Russians and their government leaders. Internal emails further specified that Facebook would be permitting content which explicitly calls for the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
I’m not here to defend Putin and the war crimes he is committing in Ukraine, but one must point out the Orwellian level of propaganda that has been rendered by Facebook in this latest statement. Is Facebook now the arbiter of geopolitics and political speech across the globe? Why is it okay for a Facebook user to call for the death of Putin on their platforms, but not Xi Jinping, who is the head of a dictatorship which is currently committing a mass genocide in Western China? Why is it okay to call for the death of Lukashenko, but not anyone in the Saudi government who is involved in the ongoing and horrific war in Yemen?
Taking this thought one step further - who else might be involved in the war in Yemen, and countless other horrific geopolitical struggles? The United States, perhaps? This is an interesting dilemma. Is Facebook going to allow for calls of violence against American leaders in light of their war crimes?
Facebook’s refusal to enforce a strict, one-size-fits-all guideline for content moderation is leading us down a rabbit hole of politically charged insanity. What is to stop Facebook in one more decade, from determining that hate speech and calls of violence against their competitors or political rivals is acceptable? For example - imagine that the US government and Facebook wanted to topple all non-democratic countries (around half of all countries on the planet). Facebook could then “temporarily” retract hate speech rules, as they did in this latest instance, to encourage citizens of non-democratic nations to dispatch their leaders. This same tactic could also be used for domestic politics. I wouldn’t be surprised to see statements from Facebook in the future which look something like this: “We have temporarily retracted our hate speech rules in America for content that is created in the context of promoting progressive cause #1536.” And don’t forget, “progressive cause” simply means whatever their employees or allies agree with.
The arbitrary justifications Facebook could summon as to why they should be permitted to engage in this form of covert state-crafting and violence are endless. We cannot permit a small group of ideologically driven Silicon Valley employees to control world events.
I would also argue that this latest policy change from Facebook was methodically enacted in tandem with Western sanctions. The USA is first trying to impoverish Russian citizens through sanctions, to induce anger among Russians. The USA then wants to foment a revolution within Russia by channeling this anger into social media platforms which Americans control. This is twenty-first century warfare. The United States artificially creates revolutions within countries by using its social media and banking sectors - and it’s a sneaky enough tactic to convince the average world citizen that these revolutions are organic.
Of course this isn’t new. The US has used similar tactics all across the globe to install puppet regimes. Particularly in Latin America and the Middle East. First you help to overthrow the existing government by instigating a civil war between identity groups, and then you support a new candidate which is amenable to US interests by controlling media and political connections.
Furthermore, Big Tech is increasingly concerned with censoring “misinformation”. Misinformation is quickly becoming a 1984 newspeak word for “anything which challenges the monopolistic power of ourselves and allies”. For example, Facebook is not at all concerned with the misinformation spread by corporate behemoths like Pfizer, who have paid billions in criminal fines, including the largest criminal fine in history. Rather they are more concerned about the “misinformation” spread by average citizens - e.g. information that casts powerful corporations and institutions in a bad light.
Facebook also outlined in its internal emails that they’d be allowing praise of the Ukrainian Nazi battalion known as the Azov Regiment. I highlight this specifically to demonstrate the absurdity and doublethink of Facebook's speech codes. This selective censorship and information suppression is rapidly transforming into an indecipherable maze of rules and regulations, which change from day to day. Agent X is “bad”, but agent X is friends with Agent Y who is “good”, and since Agent Z is friends with Agent X, it is okay to suppress the speech of Agent Z in the service of allowing calls of violence against Agent X and Agent Y, who therefore might be replaced by Agent A, which we will not allow calls to violence against because of reasons B, C and D.
Of course it’s a fools errand to analyze the logic behind these decisions, precisely because there is no logic. The only logic involved is the logic that they use to promote and protect their power. What Big Tech understands about the modern world is that information is power. If you can control the information and the narratives, you control everything. This is why the US government and Big Tech are so concerned about regulating information which flows through online platforms. If free speech allows one to question their authority, or to debate their opinions, then free speech is put on the chopping block - an inconvenient relic of the past which must be “dismantled”. In short, they want dissent and disagreement with them to be illegal, to be a crime - and they’re unfortunately making rapid progress in that endeavor.