The Tucker Carlson Video that Broke Facebook's Corner of the Internet
The Tucker Carlson Video that Broke Facebook's Corner of the Internet
When Truth Violates the Terms and Conditions of a Social Media Platform, the Truth Must Yield!
Whenever the Truth violates a social media platform’s terms and conditions, the Truth must yield. That’s the lesson I learned after a video I shared from Tucker Carlson apparently broke Facebook’s corner of the Internet.
Facebook’s Limited Usefulness
I’m not as active on Facebook these days, partly because of incidents like this, but also because the good old days of using the site for free marketing are long gone: regardless of your Fakebook audience’s size — and mine was never very large to begin with — only a tiny handful will ever see your posts, unless you are willing to spend big money on advertising. Any audience you build on Fakebook belongs to Fakebook, which effectively places them (mostly) behind a paywall. Maybe that’s smart business strategy on Fakebook’s part, but it undermines the only (in my mind) productive use of the platform.
I still have a slight presence there because of pages and groups that I built up in the past, so I’ll occasionally post things there just in case someone sees it and clicks on the link. I know the “smart” strategy for content creators is to engage with people directly on Fakebook, but I can probably count on one finger the number of insightful and interesting discussions I’ve seen on that site in the past couple years. Unless you play the “clickbait” game by creating a bunch of emotionally-charged but intellectually shallow posts, you won’t get much organic reach. To me, it’s worth it to “post-and-ghost” using old pages and groups, but I can’t think of a scenario where it would be worth it to try to build a presence on Fakebook from scratch today.
But incidents of obviously partisan censorship, like this, make me wonder if it’s even worth staying on Facebook for the limited purpose of leveraging my existing audience there — or what small remnant I’m still able to reach organically — to promote my off-Fakebook activities.
Truth Violates Fakebook’s Terms and Conditions
So what heinously evil video did I post that violated Fakebook’s terms and conditions? Just this little gem from Tucker Carlson about China’s undue influence among the USA’s political class:
I posted this video a few days ago on my own personal timeline and on a page that I created and of which I am the sole administrator. When I logged on to Fakebook today, I was informed that by posting this video I had violated their terms and conditions about spam content.
Why was this spam? Facebook did not provide an explanation, other than to link to their terms and conditions, which are so lengthy and so intentionally vague as to provide no explanation whatsoever.
At the risk of sounding like a hack public speaker, let me consult the dictionary. According to Webster’s Dictionary, “spam” is defined as “unsolicited usually commercial messages (such as emails, text messages, or Internet postings) sent to a large number of recipients or posted in a large number of places.”
Not to be confused with the brand of potted meat product or the Monty Python sketch involving that product.
Was the video I posted “spam?” I suppose an argument could be made that my post was unsolicited: nobody messaged me directly and asked, “Hey, you got any videos on anti-American, pro-Chinese corruption in the Biden Administration?”
But that argument would be weak, especially as it would apply equally to posts I have made that were not flagged as spam and which have not been taken down by the all-knowing and ever-virtuous Fakebook algorithm. Somehow, I doubt that Facebook would have flagged or removed a post containing an anti-Trump video from Rachel Maddow.
Moreover, I posted the video only on my own profile and on a page that I created and had solely managed, and the small number of people who would ever see these posts were people who had already either “befriended” me or followed my page, thereby consenting to receiving my content. By following me or my page, these fine folk had effectively solicited any and all messages that I chose to share on my timeline or page.
Facebook’s real problem with my post seems to be the content of the video and its message: a critical examination of the Biden Administration’s Chinese connections, in light of China’s open and obvious agenda of supplanting the United States as the world’s dominant power, and in light of the Biden Administration’s China-friendly policies.
Biden’s family has made a lot of money off of their Chinese connections, and you have to think: the Chinese are smart, so they’re only spending this money if they know they will get a good return on their investment.
To borrow a phrase from Will Rogers, in America we have the best politicians that money can buy; unfortunately, those politicians are all owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Facebook, like the other big tech platforms and legacy media sites, has decided its interests align with the USA’s clownishly incompetent and nakedly corrupt political class. It’s the “invisible hand” at work: lots of wealthy and powerful Americans selfishly pursue their own self-interest in the United States, while an organized and cunning adversary, China, actively manipulates the incentives to induce America’s own ruling class to sell out their country for private gain.
As Mike Shelby of Forward Observer put it:
That’s worth reading again: Some day when the USSA has collapsed, we're going to get the classified documents showing how many of our elected officials were on the dole of foreign governments and interests. This will almost certainly happen, eventually.
In the meantime, our big-tech and cathedral-media overlords have conspired to keep us from finding out just how corrupt our elected officials are. When the Truth is politically incorrect — in the original and literal meaning of the term “politically incorrect,” as in, a statement may be factually correct, but if it contravenes a narrative that must be maintained for political reasons, it is politically incorrect, such that its truth cannot be acknowledged — when the Truth is politically incorrect, you can count on Fakebook and similar social media platforms to declare that it violates their selectively enforced “terms and conditions.”
In Facebook’s ecosystem, Truth must yield to the regime’s false narrative: it must either be modified to make it politically palatable, or it must be censored.