April 11, 2018 (American Thinker) – Diamond & Silk are two massively popular supporters of President Trump who reach their millions-strong audience through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Like a bunch of fourth-world bozos, Facebook silenced the two by blocking their millions of viewers from seeing their performances (it's actually a form of performance art) in their news feeds, even though, presumably, those millions of viewers subscribed to the women's work precisely because they wanted to see it in their news feeds.
Then Facebook went really tinpot-creepy when the two uppity sisters had the temerity to ask why they were silenced. With Olympian vagueness, Facebook told them they were “unsafe” to the community and cited no examples. As for the banning, Facebook told them there was no appeal.
Now Facebook has a P.R. problem on the scale of United Airlines, and like United, the company is caving.
How did it happen? With diamond-hard logic a top lawyer would envy (doesn't the woman who goes by the name “Diamond” have the last name “Hardaway”?), Diamond laid out for Fox News and Breitbart News the bad faith, false premises, outright illegal double standards, and capricious favoritism of the social media giant in its silencing of her and her partner, actions that at a minimum are a howl for congressional regulation.
“When we signed up with Facebook they didn't say this platform was only for liberal views,” one of them told Fox News.
Diamond noted that “a lot of people say that Facebook is a private company and they can do whatever they want to do. But it is open to the public and everybody is supposed to be treated the same.”
On Facebook itself, they wrote this:
1. What is unsafe about two Blk-women supporting the President Donald J. Trump?
2. Our FB page has been created since December 2014, when exactly did the content and the brand become unsafe to the community?
3. When you say “community” are you referring to the Millions who liked and followed our page?
4. What content on our page was in violation?
5. If our content and brand was so unsafe to the community, why is the option for us to boost our content and spend money with FB to enhance our brand page still available? Maybe FB should give us a refund since FB censored our reach.
6. Lastly, didn't FB violate their own policy when FB stopped sending notifications to the Millions of people who liked and followed our brand page?
What lawyer could do better than that? What judge would not accept their legal reasoning as diamond-hard and airtight? What congressman (other than a partisan Democrat with shortsighted goals, blissfully not thinking the shoe could be on the other tootsie next time) couldn't come to the conclusion that Facebook's political censoring amounts to undeclared campaign contributions that need to be investigated and remedied, and regulation must follow? How clever of Facebook to get itself into this mess just ahead of unpopular CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vaunted appearance before Congress, a boiling #deletefacebook movement on Twitter, and a tumbling stock price.
These women are something impressive.
Under regulation, Facebook faces the loss of its current privilege to be treated as an uncensored medium and public platform, to be held as an edited publishing platform, same as newspapers. If that were to happen, Facebook would be forced to edit every post that exists on its platform, not just the popular ones, and then be held legally responsible for any bad thing that happens from even one of them if something goes wrong. So long as the company keeps up its capricious censorship policies from the young arrogant hipsters raised in full political correctness, taking their lead from Mark Zuckerberg's leftist leadership, it will be exactly what Facebook deserves. I wrote about it here.
Recognizing this dawning problem they brought on themselves, the social media behemoth has caved in, sounding like United Airlines in its bid to clean up its P.R. mess.
In a statement to Fox News, a Facebook spokesperson said: “We have communicated directly with Diamond And Silk about this issue. The message they received last week was inaccurate and not reflective of the way we communicate with our community and the people who run Pages on our platform. We have provided them with more information about our policies and the tools that are applicable to their Page and look forward to the opportunity to speak with them.”
Oh, ralf. Diamond & Silk say they haven't been reached out to, so it may be empty public relations, which will snowball Facebook's problem if the company doesn't follow through. But it's obviously the start of some kind of cave.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of tinpot leftist censors.
Published with permission from the American Thinker.