U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Censorship of pro-gun content in big tech is nothing new. Once again, the Internet giants of Silicon Valley have shown their disdain for everything that they view as right-wing.
Internet personality, Hank Strange, is the latest victim of this purge. Facebook has removed his public page. Saturday, a friend of Strange’s told him that his Facebook page was missing from the social media platform. The next day Strange logged onto his Facebook account to find his page was unpublished for “violating community guidelines.”
According to Strange, there was nothing posted on the page that violated Facebook policy for pages. Facebook forbids private sellers of firearms on their platform. Being a long-time follower of Strange, I can’t recall a single time that Strange or anyone else selling guns on his Facebook page. Like many others, Strange does post deals that he finds around the internet, but the terms of service do not forbid the sharing of deals.
Strange surmises that Facebook might have deemed the sharing of deals a violation of their terms of service. He immediately appealed the decision, but as of today, the page is still down. Facebook, to this point, has not responded to his appeal that he filed on Sunday morning. There is no timeline for the company to respond with a final decision.
“Zuckerberg talked about moving Facebook back towards freedom,” Stange told AmmoLand by phone. “This doesn’t look like freedom to me.”
Zuckerberg recently said the company would err on the side of freedom when it comes to content. It doesn’t appear that this policy applies to guns. Although Strange surmises, it could be the algorithm that is false flagging his content.
Facebook has to moderate thousands and pages and millions of posts across the website. Humans do not do most of the moderation on the platform. Facebook uses machine learning to review comments and pages, and it is not uncommon for the algorithm to false flag content.
Strange also think situations where pro-second amendment content gets censored highlights the need for our own pro-gun social media platforms. In the video world, there is Full30 and GunStreamer. Some social media sites are gun-friendly, but most run on a shoestring budget and are unknown.
“I am an advocate of me having an ecosystem of our own,” Strange said. “I would like to see the firearms industry think about that. They need to either to initiate a pro-second amendment, and a pro-freedom platform or all get behind and support an already existing platform.
Without massive support of the gun industry, it is hard for any pro-gun social media platform to get any traction. Most successful gun specific social media sites are message boards that existed before the invention of Facebook.
Second amendment advocates worry about a future widespread and sudden purge of pro-gun content. Strange and others do not think we need to abandon current sites, but we need to have a back-up plan.
The second amendment community is at a crossroads. We need to give up a little convenience and start using pro-2a sites to avoid being deplatformed.