CARL BENJAMIN – Tom's Blog

Facebook has issued an ominous new policy permitting death threats and calls for violence – so long as they’re directed against “dangerous” individuals or organizations, or someone accused (but not convicted) of a crime.

Facebook has updated its “community standards” to carve out a few exceptions to its “no death threats” policy. Calls for “high-severity violence” are now permitted, as long as they’re directed at individuals “covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy” or individuals “described as having carried out violent crimes or sexual offenses” by media reports. After all, are people banned from Facebook really people at all?

‘No future for dissidents’ on social media: Paul Joseph Watson reflects on Facebook ban

The change was spotted on Tuesday by commentator Paul Joseph Watson, who along with his former Infowars boss Alex Jones was one of a handful of mostly-conservative personalities banned from Facebook in May under its “Dangerous Individuals” policy. Back then, even mentioning one of the banned names could get a user banned – unless the mention was derogatory.

Facebook has apparently taken that “hate the haters” tactic and run with it. While the “Dangerous Individuals” policy supposedly only covers “terrorist activity, organized hate, mass or serial murder, human trafficking, and organized violence or criminal activity,” none of the commentators banned – including Watson, Jones, conservative political performance artist Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan – were involved in any of those activities. But, Watson discovered, a person wearing an Infowars t-shirt is enough to get a photo removed from Instagram, and photos that include banned individuals – even if their faces are blurred out – have been deleted as well.

Equally ominous is Facebook’s decision to dispense with the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” that forms the core of the US legal system (Facebook is based in Menlo Park, California, and at least theoretically subject to US laws). Individuals need only be accused in the media of violent crimes and sexual offenses to become fair game for death threats – not convicted in court. For a company that claims to take the threat of “fake news” very seriously, Facebook is surprisingly cavalier about the potential for media misinformation to lead to violence.

But then, Facebook never even tried to prove Watson, Jones or any of the other banned users were “Dangerous Individuals,” either – its policy has always been that banned users are guilty until proven innocent, as any user who’s ever been forced to jump through its tech support hoops to restore a banned account can attest.

“The largest social media company in the world with over 2 billion users literally says it’s fine to incite violence against me, despite this being illegal,” Watson wrote at Summit.news, pointing out that sending death threats or threats of violence is, in fact, a crime under UK law (as it is under US law and the laws of most developed countries with substantial Facebook-using populations).

Facebook even tracks off-platform behavior to determine whether users should be blacklisted as “hate agents,” according to internal documents seen by Breitbart, meaning merely showing up at the same event as a “dangerous individual” can potentially earn a user the designation. The site’s list of “hate agents” is reportedly quite exhaustive and includes British politicians Carl Benjamin and Anne Marie Waters as well as conservative commentators like Yiannopoulos and Candace Owens. Because all this classification goes on in secret, users have no chance to appeal their un-personing, and may never even know they are being judged, until they start receiving Facebook-approved death threats of their own.

Campaign accounts of two British candidates for the European Parliament, Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin, have been deleted by Twitter, prompting outcries of election meddling with less than a month before the vote.

Robinson and Benjamin – better known under his YouTube handle ‘Sargon of Akkad’ – are running in the May 23 election, which the UK will have to participate in due to the ongoing Brexit delays. Benjamin is a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), while Robinson announced his independent candidacy on Thursday.

Both of them have had personal accounts purged from Twitter a while ago, but the accounts terminated on Friday were run by their campaign staff, and not them personally.

“We are investigating why, but strongly suspect this is a deliberate act of political censorship to deny a candidate his voice in a crucial election,” Benjamin’s campaign staffer Michael De La Broc said, adding the campaign will complain to the election authorities and maybe even seek restitution in court for “political interference by a foreign entity in our elections.”

UKIP has also declared the ban “election interference” and vowed to “get to the bottom” of the issue.

Benjamin has come under attack by the media and establishment politicians, who have accused him of “racist” speech. The YouTuber maintains he fights for free speech and against political correctness.

Mainstream media have described Robinson as a “far-right activist” and accused him of “Islamophobia.” He was banned from Facebook and Instagram in February over alleged “hate speech.”

British Muslim organization Tell MAMA has claimed credit for reporting Robinson’s campaign account to Twitter, saying it’s using the candidacy to circumvent his personal ban.

I'm sure the British Army will be delighted to learn that Yaxley-Lennon is using a clip of him meeting several Army Cadets in his campaign video. pic.twitter.com/0VDvA1B93j

— TellMAMAUK (@TellMamaUK) April 25, 2019

The purge of MEP candidates comes just three days after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey went to the White House and met with US President Donald Trump to address complaints about “shadowbanning” and suspensions disproportionately targeting conservative voices on the social media platform.

While Twitter and other social media platforms have defended censorship on grounds that they are companies and not the government, last year a federal judge in the US ruled that Twitter is a “designated public forum,” and that Trump is not allowed to block people from his personal account on grounds of political speech.

Tag: CARL BENJAMIN

Judge, jury & executioner: Facebook policy permits death threats against ‘dangerous individuals’

Facebook has issued an ominous new policy permitting death threats and calls for violence – so long as they’re directed against “dangerous” individuals or organizations, or someone accused (but not convicted) of a crime.