Caitlin Johnstone: Meta Steps Up Aggressive Censorship

Facebook and Instagram, when combined, have 5 billion users worldwide. It’s impossible to overstate how their regulation of speech in pro-U.S. direction can impact human communication.

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.

I am at risk of getting banned from both Instagram and Facebook as both Meta-owned platforms keep censoring my criticisms of Israel’s U.S.-backed atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon, placing strikes on my accounts in the process.

Both Facebook and Instagram have deleted screenshots of a post I made on Twitter (or whatever you call it now) which reads as follows:

“Iran is not my enemy. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the middle east and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror.”

In the reasons given for this censorship, both Facebook and Instagram said

“It looks like you shared symbols, praise or support of people and organizations we define as dangerous, or followed them.”

My appeals against this removal have been denied, saying the post “does not follow our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organisations.”

Hours later, Instagram removed a second post citing the same reasons, this one about Lebanon and Hezbollah. It was two screenshots from a longer Twitter post which reads as follows:

“Hezbollah are just Lebanese people. There’s this framing of ‘liberating Lebanon from Hezbollah’ like they’re some kind of invasive, alien presence, when they’re an entirely native fighting force organically arising from the injustices and abuses inflicted by Israel and the west.

The imperial spin machine always does this. The empire uses narrative to try and de-couple the people it wants to kill from the rest of the population in the nation they are targeting in order to legitimize the violence they want to inflict upon the country. They want to take out a certain government or element within a nation that conflicts with their interests, so they start babbling about ‘terrorists’ or ‘evil dictators’ or ‘regimes’ in order to make it seem like they’re not just attacking a country and murdering people who disobey them.

If they can uncouple a nation from the people in that nation who they want to kill in the eyes of the public, then they can portray that killing as a heroic act of liberation from a force which doesn’t belong there. If they can get you to believe that, then they can get you to believe they’re killing people for the benefit of the nation they’re attacking, instead of for their own benefit.

It’s literally always solely and exclusively for their own benefit, though. It’s literally always a lie.”

As you can see, both of these posts are just criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States, the nation where Meta is based. Meta has an extensive history of working hand in glove with the U.S. government to regulate speech.

This is indistinct from government censorship. If the U.S. government designates its enemies as “terrorists” and massive Silicon Valley platforms are censoring criticism of U.S. wars against those enemies in order to be in compliance with U.S. law, then the U.S. government is just censoring speech that criticizes U.S. warmongering, using a corporate proxy in Silicon Valley.

?BREAKING? @Meta will ban the use of the term ‘Zionist’ as an antisemitic proxy for ‘Jews’.

The announcement is a much-needed advancement in our ongoing fight against online antisemitism and hatred.

By recognizing and addressing the misuse of the term 'Zionist,' Meta is…

— World Jewish Congress (@WorldJewishCong) July 9, 2024

Meta has been ramping up censorship of speech that’s critical of Israel and its U.S.-backed atrocities for a while now, with a sharp increase that was anecdotally noticeable immediately after the company announced back in July that it would be instituting vague new censorship protocols against the word “Zionism.” 

After that move, critics of U.S. foreign policy such as Aaron Maté, Jonathan Cook and Tadhg Hickey began reporting that their posts about Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza were being unexpectedly taken down on Facebook. 

I also had one of my articles which was critical of Israel removed from Facebook in July, which the platform refused to reinstate. This followed other acts of censorship that Facebook has been imposing on my account since last October, all for my criticisms of Israel’s U.S.-backed atrocities in Gaza. 

Last November Facebook deleted an X/Twitter screenshot from my page which read,

“You don’t understand man, Hamas uses human shields. Really really advanced human shields, the kind where there aren’t even any Hamas members anywhere near them. It’s just 100% human shield with 0% combatant, the most secure kind of shield there is.”

Damn, Facebook really is cracking down hard on anti-Israel speech. I didn't even say the word "Zionist" in that post. pic.twitter.com/ACsTQEkrym

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 11, 2024

Last January Facebook deleted a post which read as follows: 

“Someone asked ‘Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?’

This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural homegrown emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.

If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure.

Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats.

Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.”

This is all self-evidently political speech which is critical of the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful government and its allies. But because the platform has been deleting my criticisms of U.S. foreign policy so frequently, my page is now designated “at risk,” and whenever I log on I now receive a notification which reads,

“Don’t lose your Page! If you get a few more Community Standards violations, you could lose Caitlin Johnstone forever. Nobody wants that?—?help out by appealing violations that you disagree with, but more importantly, try to share content that follows the rules.”

Facebook’s Page Status section tells me,

“Your Page is restricted because it didn’t follow Community Standards. We know that we’re not always right, so if you think that we got it wrong, you can disagree with our decision and in some cases, get the restriction removed.” 

My attempts to get these strikes reversed have been rejected.

I think it’s important to document all this in detail because Meta is such a massive tool of U.S. imperial narrative control. Facebook has a staggering 3 billion users worldwide, and Instagram has 2 billion. It’s impossible to overstate the impact that censoring speech in a pro-U.S. direction will have on worldwide human communication.

From my earliest days at this gig I’ve been making a point of forcefully criticizing the world’s mightiest and most tyrannical power structure and then documenting the various ways the imperial narrative managers have worked to diminish my reach. 

I’ve been algorithmically throttled on Facebook since 2017, I’ve been permanently banned on TikTok and keep encountering censorship there under my new account, and I was even banned from Twitter until some commentators with larger voices than my own intervened on my behalf. 

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and the manipulation of information on the internet is a major agenda of the U.S.-centralized empire toward that end. These pricks won’t be happy until we’re all a bunch of mindless, bleating sheep.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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