Per official Facebook statistics released for the first time, 100,000 comments were purged for being "hateful." If that is not bad enough, it is even more disturbing that this number only comes from one country. What does thatsay about the rest of the world?
For the first time Facebook has mentioned its own number for comments that were removed. In the last month in Germany, around 100,000 content items with hateful comments and insults were deleted, said Facebook's European policy director, Richard Allan. However the company did not publish details of how many messages were complained about as a whole in this period and how the number of deleted comments changed in recent months.
One of the most serious problems remains the lack of transparency, said Federal Justice Minister Heiko Maas. "We should therefore consider whether we should obligate social networks to publish how many complaints they have received about illegal hate comments and how they dealt with them," said the SPD politician.
Criminal content on the internet is still deleted "too little and too slowly," said Maas. (source)
Today, "criminal content" means having an opinion that is other than what the mainstream "orthodoxy" says "truth" is even when the opposite is plainly apparent.
Here at Shoebat.com, we express a lot of opinions, and as we note in our articles, we are very familiar with harassment from Facebook thought police. We have all been banned in one way or another from Facebook, and it is only a matter of time before our temporary bans become permanent.
All of this is because we have opinions that are considered "controversial" in our current day. Many people agree with us, and many people disagree with us. That is fine, because even if people hate us, we cannot be accused of lacking an opinion of our own. As one Sicilian person I knew once said, "Un uomo senza enimici e un uomo senza carracateri," meaning "A man without enemies is a man without character."
The fact is that we will not all agree on everything. That should be understood, and while we may passionately disagree with each other, in today's Internet world it is common for people to react with almost immediate and impassioned anger at any display of disagreement with their personal convictions. It crosses all politicial, religious, and cultural lines, and while certain types of anger can be justified, many times there is simply too much anger for too little of a matter. This is partially behind the fuel of this Facebook censorship trend, for by playing on the emotions and whims of men, which are inherently fickle and prone to change, people with evil intentions can manipulate public opinion in what is nothing less than an alternative approach to a Hegelian dialectic.
For me, I actually enjoy listening many times to people who I firmly disagree with, because of the fact that I often times can learn something from him. While I do have my views and I hold them strongly, I am also open to considering views which I had not previously held. While I do not often talk about it, for a long time I had opinions that were in direct contradiction to many of those which I hold today, and the reason that I eventually changed is because I was open to considering and actually listening to and thinking through arguments that were not my own. I do not say this as something cavalier, that I just change my views at a whim, but if the old saying that I have often cited here that says "even a broken clock is right twice a day" is true, then there is often times a golden nugget of wisdom even in the most fervent of disagreements.
I have a friend who is becoming Catholic right now from a Pentecostal background. He was not forced, but introduced to the Catholic Faith through his father, who I have also had the pleasure of befriending. His father was a former Baptist and later, Pentecostal minister who was infamous in the Chicago and midwest area for having misguided hundreds and possibly thousands of Catholics out of the Church and into Protestantism. However, after considering the Catholic Faith through keeping and open mind and with years of careful study, he is now himself Catholic and actually going back to people he knew who he lead astray and guiding them back to the Church.
Hearts and minds, while difficult and many times slow, can and do change because man has free will. As I know from past and current experience, disagreement is fine and good, but so is keeping an open mind to alternative viewpoints, especially those which one disagrees with. It is a lesson for all men and Facebook alike.
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