Harmeet Dhillon Appears on FBN’s ‘Cavuto Coast to Coast’ To Discuss Facebook
According to Dhillon:
Absolutely. They are not just banning specific comments or remarks that are hurtful or violate their terms of service. They are actually banning people and mainly they are banning people in their announcement yesterday for who they associate with. I mean, that’s the really scary part is that, actually, only Louis Farrakhan was banned for things that he actually said. The others were banned for people they associate with who are already people who Facebook doesn’t like. On top of that, the new rule says that if you, a regular user who is not on that list of banned people, retweets or quotes or shares their information that they put out there then you can be banned too if you linked too often to the publications of these people in some other place. That is really dangerous because federal courts have held that banning even the sex offenders from using social media is a violation of their due process rights and civil rights and now, we’re actually banning people for who they associate with. I think that is very dangerous.
Neil, correctly thinking several Libertarians, the people who respect the First Amendment have been decrying the fact that on college campuses around the country for the last two decades, students have been taught that speech is violence and we laugh at that. Yet, this is exactly the paradigm that Facebook has introduced with a conflation of speech and violence. Speech is not violent, speech is speech. The antidote to speech you don’t like is more speech, or as you said, don’t follow that person or don’t click on that link. We’re all adults and we can do that.
Not only that, Paul Joseph Watson, one of the people who was banned has never actually been cited to say anything that would be considered offensive. He was just guilt by association with Alex Jones and others. I think this is going to have a huge chilling effect and the hypocrisy is really what concerns a lot of conservatives because although they threw Louis Farrakhan in there, people who are quoting and supporting Louis Farrakhan like Snoop Dogg, he still has an account on Facebook, Hamas is there, many accounts said Hate Jews are there. It seems to be that the bulk of people who are being banned and de-platformed and depersoned from these platforms are people with conservative views.
Not only that, but the terms of service that Facebook has which are a contract between its users and itself do not specify any of these reasons. It does not say in there that if you associate with people who we don’t like or who we find to be icky, we can ban you. With regard to your earlier segment on cryptocurrency, now we will be having social media companies put out forms of currency, we are actually banning some people from being able to use those? That has very troubling civil rights implications as well. Thank you, Neil.
