Zuckerburg’s racist crew funded Trump GOP right up to the Washington, DC attack
According to Facebook the comment below constitutes ‘hate speech’. ‘Hate speech’ apparently against fascist terrorists and Trump’s thugs who attacked the Capitol Building in Washington DC on January 6th. The author of the comment (myself) was given a ban from Facebook for 30 Days on 31 Jan 2021, supposedly for ‘hate speech’:
“The problem is that Trump is not separable from Johnson, Farage, Le Pen, Salvini, Tony Abbott, the far right wing regimes in Poland and Hungary, Bolsonoro, Modi, and all the rest in Europe and around the world.
American exceptionalism doesn’t make him supportable, defensible, or worthy of any sympathy in any way. It WAS an attempted coup. He attempted to stay in power despite clearly losing an election. They should have been shot down like rabbits. In fact only about two of them got what they deserved. For that, the cops should be condemned for complicity.
Trump never won the popular vote in 2016 either and that democratic issue as far as I am concerned was a concentrated expression of the undemocratic nature of the USA. His assassination would have been justified in democratic terms if anyone had managed it. His presidency was not.
I’m not in favour of ‘challenges’ to the ‘status quo’ that are worse than the status quo itself. If rednecks get angry about their loss of perceived superiority over others and demand their old status back (“make America great again”) that is not a class conscious revolt against capitalism.
That is a big “FUCK YOU” to the rest of the world’s population. These people deserve to have their faces ground in the shit, including by their ‘own’ bosses, to teach them that they are actually slaves, coolies, and not a superior race. As long as they believe they are a superior race they can fuck off and die.
I have the same attitude to Trump supporters swaggering around the US abusing the Black and Immigrant population as I do to Zionist settlers in Palestine. They only have the right to exist insofar as they treat others equally and with some basic humanity. If they don’t (and they don’t – that’s the understatement of the millennium!) then fuck them. Let them die.
The same goes for idiot ex-miners who support Boris Johnson. Thatcher destroyed the pits and steelworks and those who forget that and blame foreigners and migrants, and wave the Union Jack? They are fucking cretins who deserve to get pissed on. They don’t deserve any sympathy or solidarity. Not until they show some to others. Failing that, they can fucking starve for all I care.
I don’t see anything positive about the support for him. Just as I don’t see anything positive about Brexit. The gilets jaunes in France did actually tell the far right to fuck off and show some sign of real class consciousness in that regard.
But Trumpism and Brexit was about ‘we want our imperial status back’ and there was nothing good about it. In that it does bear similarity to Hitlerism which was about vengeance for Germany’s loss of imperial power. From part of the population that was intoxicated with that power.”
They are absolutely naked about this. This is censorship of political views that are held by many millions about the criminal nature of the Trump insurrection. The fascist and white supremacist nature of the mob that stormed though the US parliamentary centre is clear. They threatened the lives of politicians they disapproved of, everyone from Vice-President Pence leftward. “Hang Mike Pence” they chanted, calling for the death of the VP, who is politically similar to Ronald Reagan – on the right-wing end of the spectrum of bourgeois-democratic politics in the US. The threat was because he carried out his mandated duties and presided over the counting of electoral votes for the Electoral College, and refused to join Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election result against both the popular vote and Electoral College, and thus help create a while supremacist dictatorship in the US.
Violent Racism: A ‘Protected Characteristic’ for Facebook
It does not take a genius to figure out that if they wanted to “Hang Mike Pence” for not doing their bidding, what they would like to do to every liberal Congressman or Senator, every black, Latinx, gay, or any other representative of groups these fascists hate. The lives of all these people were in peril. Not to mention that they refused to wear masks or observe social distancing, as did their sympathisers and complicit politicians among the far-right Republicans some of whom are known to have infected with Covid-19 others who were forced into proximity with them in fear of being attacked while being evacuated away from the fascist mob.
Facebook, in saying this is ‘hate speech’, is saying that to say that these far-right terrorists deserved to be shot is in some way attacking a ‘protected characteristic’. Facebook have a long, convoluted definition of what constitutes ‘hate speech’ regarding ‘protected characteristics’, but the basic idea is correct – that no one should be attacked for their national origin or their race or ethnicity, religious affiliation or background, sex or gender, sexuality, religion, disability, or disease.
Unless being a violent racist is also included in this list of protected characteristics, it is very clear that not only is there no attack on anyone for their origin in the comment above, but the only people who are condemned in the comment are people who target others for their protected characteristics.
So, Facebook are clearly breaking their own Community Standards here, and supporting and protecting those who break them to attack others for their protected characteristics.
In fact, Facebook’s Community Standards contain a deliberate loophole that apparently allows bigoted attacks on people for their protected characteristics in certain circumstances. In its definition of ‘hate speech’, specifically under the heading of ‘Tier One’, it forbids:
“Content targeting a person or group of people (including all subsets except those described as having carried out violent crimes or sexual offences) on the basis of their aforementioned protected characteristic(s) or immigration status with … Violent speech or support in written or visual form ….”
https://touch.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech/
So according to this, it is permissible to target with ‘violent speech’ specifically that ‘subset’ of members of an ethnic or other ‘protected’ group who are ‘described’ as ‘having carried out violent crimes or sexual offences” “on the basis of their aforementioned protected characteristic(s) or immigration status…”
This appears to have been explicitly formulated to allow the far right to incite hatred. For instance, Trump’s notorious 2016 speech where he said that Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and their rapists”. His solution to this supposed problem was to “build that wall” and (among other things) the vile abuse of abducting children from their parents and deporting their parents without them.
So, Facebook formulated a loophole in its ‘Community Standards’ whose obvious purpose is to allow violent racists like Trump to incite hatred against those with ‘protected characteristics’ by focussing on ‘subsets’ of such groups that are “described as having carried out violent crimes or sexual offences”. Everyone knows that such dog-whistles target entire oppressed groups and serve to incite hatred and violence against them.
But in allowing this, FB have a problem. If it is permitted to target ‘subsets’ of people “described” as violent or sex criminals on the basis of their … “protected characteristic(s) or immigration status” with “violent speech … in written or visual form”, then logically it ought to permitted to so target people who are so “described” not on the basis of any protected characteristic, but simply on the basis of their violent or sexual crimes.
This is where Facebook clearly shows itself to be a white supremacist outfit.
The attack on the Capitol was a violent crime. Everyone who set foot in the Capitol building as part of that insurrection on Jan 6th is a felon and a violent criminal, by definition.
But Facebook in practice, by this action (which was appealed, but they ignored the appeal), regards statements to the effect that such violent racists deserve to be shot, or die, or starve, not because of any protected characteristic, but simply because of their racist, often violent and hate-filled bigoted behaviour, as ‘hate speech’, and bans people for that.
So effectively, Facebook are saying that being a racist, indeed arguably ESPECIALLY being a violent racist, is a protected characteristic.
Of course, they won’t put that in their ‘Community Standards’. But that is what their practice means.
Because Facebook management, despite the bullshit in their ‘Community Standards’, are actually white supremacists. This must obviously include its head, Zuckerburg, as he is the man in charge.
As was revealed shortly after the attack on the Capitol, Facebook had been funding the Trumpist GOP for years. They, along with many other corporate bodies, ostentatiously announced the withdrawal of that funding after Jan 6.
What does this funding, and then its withdrawal, signify? Obviously, it does not signify any distaste for the racism, the voter suppression, all the despicable things the GOP have been doing to the oppressed in the US, long before Trump. It does not even signify any dissent from the criminality of Trump prior to 6 Jan.
The only thing it signifies is rats leaving the sinking ship. If it had not sunk, they would still be on board. If Trump had succeeded in overthrowing the election and establishing a white supremacist dictatorship, which was the purpose of the insurrection, then Facebook would still be on board.
Its clear that Facebook for all their hypocritical ‘Community Standards’ in fact supported Trump and white supremacy. They have also recently gone on the warpath against the Left. A number of Socialist and left-wing groups have been supressed, or such suppression has been attempted, by Facebook, including bans against the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and the World Socialist Web Site/Socialist Equality Party in the United States. This is in the aftermath of the failure of Trump’s insurrection.
It is possible that the impetus for this might be the result of pressure from the new Biden administration to crackdown on so-called ‘extremism’ – including too militant anti-racism apparently – except that there is no visible indication of this. And this action clearly involved defending the Trump insurrectionists. Frameup bans of the left on social media occurred regularly under Trump.
For Workers Action to Enforce Workers Democracy on Social Media
We are not free speech absolutists; we are in favour of supressing violent racists and fascists. But our strategy is not to rely on the bourgeois state or corporate bodies to do it for us. We are for independent working-class action, including the setting up of workers militias to defend the masses independently. Though if fascists engage in outright armed conflict with an existing, non-fascist government attempting to seize power outside of bourgeois constitutionalism, we consider their defeat by the existing bourgeois-democratic government and state forces to be the lesser evil and are in favour of a military bloc with them, through the use of deadly force to suppress the threat decisively.
The workers movement should not take censorship by Facebook and its corporate racist thugs lying down. Facebook, Twitter, and other such social media have social power over political discourse and should not be allowed to use it to suppress the working-class movement and the left. Not only do we advocate workers militias to suppress threats to the working class from fascists, it would be excellent if the workers movement were to create its own cyber-military organs.
There are many ethical hackers/hacktivists out there, with the relevant skills and sympathetic to the left, who could retaliate against Facebook and other such racist, anti-democratic outfits in an organised way, and even bring their operations to a halt if they insist on supressing labour movement discussions online. Labour movement organisations themselves need to bring this about using their collective strength. Industrial action and labour boycotts targeted at these social media outfits could also be used in tandem with more novel means of struggle. We also need our own organs, run on the ethos of workers democracy, but the left must take the initiative in forcing workers democracy and workers control onto the bodies that currently control the means of social communication, as a prelude to their expropriation.
