Facebook Censorship
In October of '09, a group of Muslims who demanded the deletion of an anti-Islamic Facebook group organized a boycott of Facebook The blog post I wrote about their boycott is still receiving views from all over the world, long after "Qur'an Toilet Paper Roll" was deleted, recreated and deleted again.
My involvement in Facebook resulted from a Google Alert for "Ban Islam" which linked to a post on the "Ban Islam!!" group. That post included an error which I wanted to correct. That is how I got hooked. I had to register a Facebook account and join the group in order to comment on the post. "Ban Islam!!" grew to more than 3000 members. It was a lively forum with many informative articles.
Then it was gone. No notice, no warning, no chance to save content; it was arbitrarily deleted March 8. I immediately invited my friends to join the smaller, less active group "Ban Islam". Other members invited their friends, and the group grew rapidly. Then, when I refreshed a page after commenting, it disappeared, arbitrarily pulled down just as its larger brother had been. The groups creator started over, and the group was deleted again the next day.
Yes, we did bash Islam. I, for one, cursed it. I tried to concentrate on well documented and logical arguments, but almost everyone backslides occasionally. Muslims joined our groups to comment and sometimes to debate with us. Many of them confined their activities to the wall, posting obscenities, suggestions related to sexually deviant status & activities and insults.
On February 17, two new wall posts appeared, posted by unfamiliar persons: "Ahmad Faris" and "Steve Brule", who posted a list of the administrators of "Ban Islam!!' followed by "they must die", linking the posts to a new Facebook Group "DELETE GROUP = BAN ISLAM!!". One of the members had read the wall posts and saved a screen shot, tagging other members with it. In my haste, I overlooked the death threat, concentrating on the fact that they copied our admin list. I followed the link and saw this.
The Admin list from "Ban Islam!!" in the left sidebar.
Why list our administrators on a page demanding our deletion? There is only one possibility: intimidation. They later added the death threat, in a foreign language. We followed up by reporting them to Facebook, who took no action. At the time of this writing, it is still available. The page has been edited to remove the death threat. I would like to show you the screen shot of the threat. Unfortunately, it was stored in the group's photograph section, which was deleted with the group.
Facebook also deleted several smaller anti-Islamic groups with offensive titles. It appears that Facebook has acted to appease the demands of Muslim groups. Observe the size of some of them. (Click the image for enlargement.)
Unfortunately, Facebook's aversion to "hate speech" seems to be monopolar. Each item in the following list is a link to a Facebook group which attacks Judaism or Christianity. Most of them have an obscenity in their names. Do not click on these if you are easily offended!!!!
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