Facebook Censors Conservatives, but Opens the Door to Terrorists

A double-standard policy hard to justify

While Facebook is waging war on conservatives, it allows terrorist groups to thrive on its platform. A new Tech Transparency Project (TTP) investigation reveals that the social media giant has created 108 pages for the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Facebook creates the pages based on its algorithm, automatically generating them when users add terror groups to their profiles.

TTP also identified additional auto-generated pages for groups and terms affiliated with Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. One of these pages was opened as recently as October 2022. Around that time, a Facebook post with tens of thousands of likes claimed that the Palestinians weren’t playing in the World Cup because Israel was “murdering” their players, according to United with Israel. Facebook left the page open.

Researchers from The Counter Extremism Project have also spotted numerous elements of ISIS propaganda on Facebook, in particular on a page created in May 2020 that gathered thousands of likes. The page has published statements from ISIS leaders and photos related to the group, one of them showing Samuel Paty, a teacher who was beheaded in France in October 2020 by a Chechen refugee.

That same month, ISIS’s spokesperson, Abu Hamza al-Qurashi, released a video statement calling for increased acts of terrorism against U.S. and European interests. One of ISIS’S French supporter groups, Infos An-Nur, relayed al-Qurashi’s message on Instagram, which, as we know, is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms.

But Meta didn’t just open the door to terrorists; it also facilitated the activities of Mexican cartels. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s network, for instance, showed gold-plated guns and bloody crime scenes on Facebook and Instagram without anyone raising an eyebrow.

All People Aren’t Equal

One day, the left will have to clearly explain why it professes so much hatred for the Western civilization. Why, for instance, deplatform Donald Trump but not Asian and Middle Eastern autocrats?

Examples of that kind have been normalized within Big Tech companies, starting with Facebook. In 2021, Gad Saad, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, was banned by the social media giant for criticizing Veena Malik, a Pakistani celebrity. In a tweet, Malik had quoted Adolf Hitler: “I would have killed all the Jews of the world […] but I kept some to show the world why I killed them.”

That post was part of a series of pro-Palestinian comments on the Israel-Gaza conflict. But Facebook chose to ban Gad Saad over Malik.

In 2018, the online platform’s administrators also accepted to comply with Turkey’s President and thug-in-chief Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to block posts by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a group made up mainly of Kurds who oppose the Islamist despot. “I’m fine with this”, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s number two, wrote in an email at the time, referring to the censorship of the YPG.

From then on, all YPG posts about the brutal attacks by the Turkish army against the Kurdish minority became inaccessible to Facebook users in Turkey.

Sources

Counter Extremism Project, Newsweek, ProPublica, Tech Transparency Project, United with Israel