Recently on of the editors of our media presence was banned for posting a video from Rebel Media. The video depicted a rally in Canada and the reporter, was questioning a participant at the rally about Canadian law.
In the video, the reporter questioned a participant with respect to Sharia Law, the question being, "Do you want Sharia Law in Canada?" As the conversation progressed, the man in question responded with, "Sharia Law is coming, and there is nothing you can do about it."
He further went on to claim that Sharia law will punish members of the LGBTQ community because it goes against their religious beliefs.
Without going into a full description of the video because it may be considered against Facebook's community standards, the reporter went on to claim that punishing someone for their sexual orientation is wrong.
Our Editor, had his account suspended from Facebook's social media platform for sharing the video. A video that was a newsworthy video depicting two different sides of a political spectrum. No reason was given other than the video was against Facebook Terms of service.
According to Facebook own Terms of service, on Hate speech, which appears to change with the weather, there was no violation. It was simply an interview of someone expressing their opinion in a respectful manner. It is important to note that, Facebook Terms of Service is usually not clear because they use algorithms to detect speech patterns. Often, the post is not even seen by humans, but rather fits nicely into their automatic algorithmic response. However in this case, the viewer of the video would have to be from one of the protected classes of people mentioned in Facebook terms of service.
Facebook defines hate speech as: "a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability. We also provide some protections for immigration status. We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation."
Social media by its censorship of opinion is creating a dangerous precedent. By silencing people for sharing non-offensive, non-threatening opinions, they are creating a vacuum for one sided commentary, or as some would put it propaganda.
Wecu News believes in a free and independent press. We may not agree with everything that is said, but we believe that people have the right to their opinion and people should listen to the opinion of others to have knowledge to make day to day decisions.
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