Left-Wing Activist Group: Facebook ‘Dangerous Threat’ to Free Speech

Left-wing activist group Fight For The Future has condemned censorship by Facebook following the removal of a number of left-wing protest pages allegedly linked to Russian actors.

Following Facebook’s banning of 32 political pages and accounts suspected of “co-ordinated inauthentic behavior” linked to foreign agents, left-wing activist group Fight For The Future has voiced their anger over censorship by Facebook. In a press release, the group claims that one of the event pages that Facebook removed was, in fact, an authentic protest that was wrongfully targeted by Facebook. It would appear that this one event being deleted is enough for the far-left group to condemn Facebook for censorship of political voices on their platform.

“Arbitrary mass censorship is not the solution for the challenges democracy faces in the digital age,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, “Calls for more censorship, whether they come from the left or right, pose a dangerous threat to legitimate freedom of speech and undermine the power of the Internet as a tool for people to organize, educate themselves, and challenge tyranny and corruption. Do we really want an Internet where giant tech companies like Facebook are the arbiters of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’ and can censor whatever they want without oversight or accountability?”

Greer continued to state:“Dragnet censorship operations, whether related to copyright or political content, always come with serious unintended consequences, where legitimate content is taken down. Lawmakers who are concerned about the power that large tech companies have to spread misinformation should call for more transparency and more competition, not more censorship.” Greer stated: “One simple policy decision on the table right now is restoring net neutrality protections, which allow startups and small businesses to thrive and compete with giants like Twitter and Facebook, leading to more decentralization that makes coordinated misinformation campaigns much harder.”

The activist group issued a public call for Facebook to stop their censorship practices stating: “Fight for the Future condemns Facebook’s decision to censor a legitimate protest page because of a link to a single ‘inauthentic’ account, and calls on the platform to cease any similar censorship plans, and instead focus on transparency initiatives to make it easier for Internet users to know who is paying for the content they’re seeing.”

Breitbart News has been reporting on Facebook’s censorship of voices on the right for some time, Senator Ted Cruz even grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the topic of censorship in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees, but it appears that all it takes for voices on the left to speak up about the issue is for a single event page to allegedly wrongfully remove. At least it appears that Facebook is being held to account on both sides of the political aisle, putting further pressure on the social media firm.