It’s no secret that Facebook constantly censors content, but a recent investigation from Vice has the outlet suddenly upset that censorship might even happen to them. The platform has reportedly censored some groups just for using the word “men” and liberals don’t grasp the irony that they can’t say “men are trash.”
Vice’s investigation claimed that Facebook is “cracking down” on groups “dedicated to discussing everyday injustices in the patriarchal world that we live in.” These groups reportedly violated “Facebook’s standard for hate speech for seemingly simply mentioning the word ‘men.’” By saying bad things about “men” as a group, not individual men.
Multiple groups across Facebook said they were finding that “anything even remotely negative about men gets automatically flagged or taken down”:
“‘Posts and comments started being removed around October 2020,’ Carla Davis*, 26, tells VICE. She is one of the admins of the group ‘The bar for men is so low it’s a tavern in hades.’ Having started in May 2019, the group discusses society’s reactions to men's actions, wherein they’re put on a pedestal for doing the bare minimum at the expense of others. ‘At first it was just a few comments, but then it started happening more often. Now content is being removed almost every day.’”
Vice even changed the names of the admins interviewed to protect their identities.
“The phrase ‘men are trash’ has been a known target for a long time. But now it’s getting ridiculous. There was one (deleted comment) recently that literally just said ‘I dislike men,’” Lauren Smith, another page admin, told Vice. Facebook did not respond to a request to confirm this information from MRC TechWatch.
“Owing to these efforts to promote free expression, there is no way these groups want to stop people from discussing the issues they’ve faced with men, whom one of the admins refers to as ‘the trash gender’.[sic] So they’re trying to find workarounds. They’ve asked members to refer to men by calling them anything but the m-word. So it is now common for members to use ‘m3n’, ‘ñ€m’, ‘m~ń’— anything that tricks the algorithm into believing there’s nothing going on there. But AI might be a step ahead already,” Vice reported.
Although Vice came at the issue of Facebook censorship from an overtly left-wing feminist standpoint, this is far from the first time that Facebook has censored specific words or phrases. The platform censored the #stopthesteal hashtag, but recently decided to remove even mentions of the phrase. Facebook has also suspended President Donald Trump at least until after President-Elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. To name just a few.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at 1-650-308-7300 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to provide clarity on “hate speech,” rules that seem to be applied inconsistently If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
