Facebook Censorship

I'm following a Norwegian lawyer on Facebook. He specializes in the defense of individuals against the state, in particular the CPS. This makes him of course an enemy of the state, and the man is no doubt closely monitored by various state institutions. For one, his Facebook account appears to be monitored and censored, which is hardly surprising given the man's track record.

An interesting aspect of this is the way censors reveal themselves through their interference on Facebook. In the particular case of my Facebook lawyer friend, censorship was directed towards the comment section, rather than the lawyer's own post. I needed to click on a link to open the comments, and when I did, I was presented by one comment only. All the other comments were for some reason marked irrelevant. To read the irrelevant comments as well, I had to click another link.

What I found was that while the original post was about the connection between Epstein and the Clinton foundation, the only comment deemed relevant was a picture of Trump together with Epstein. The comments deemed irrelevant pointed out that the Norwegian state has sent more than 100 million dollars to the Clinton foundation and that central members of the Norwegian royal family have had close relations with Epstein.

The hidden comments were not made invisible because they were untrue, but because the extra information contained in them were deemed irrelevant. Yet the fact that Trump and Epstein have met on occasions was considered relevant. The censor's agenda was in other words on open display. The state must be protected against the truth. Trump, on the other hand, deserves no such protection.

Furthermore, the fact that the censored comments were made in Norwegians, with fairly vague language, indicate that the censor was of Norwegian origin. It was not some random Facebook algorithm, but a person paid to do this kind of work.

This means that Facebook provides tools to foreign states with the express purpose of censoring dissenting voices. The Norwegian censor in question was almost certainly in Norway, paid by the Norwegian state to monitor posts and comments. A user interface provided by Facebook let censors mark posts and comments as untrue, irrelevant or highly relevant. While highly relevant comments appear immediately below a post, the less relevant ones require one or two clicks to be shown, depending on whether they are deemed neutral or irrelevant.

While none of this surprised me, I was struck by the blatant obviousness of what's going on. I decided therefore to make a comment myself, pointing out that only the Trump-Epstein picture was displayed to me as relevant. I further replied to the Trump-Epstein comment with a congratulation for being the only one to post a comment not filtered by Facebook.

By Facebook, Inc. - http://en.facebookbrand.com, Public Domain, Link