Facebook's Community Double Standards

Facebook's Community Double Standards

Is Facebook flirting with fascism? The question might prove difficult to answer with a resounding “yes or no,” but, to those who have been keeping track of its recent censorship practices, the answer appears to lean heavily toward the affirmative.

Yesterday, on 9 January 2014, after over five years of operation, popular Facebook page Anarchist Memes was permanently taken down by Facebook. With approximately 90,000 likes and hundreds of comments each day, Anarchist Memes established itself as one of the radical left’s most prominent Facebook pages. It posted feminist, anti-racist, pro-LGBT*QA, and anti-capitalist content numerous times a day. For years, the page and its administrators experienced endless harassment and trolling, yet it demonstrated an outstanding, resolute commitment to establishing a safe, non-oppressive digital environment. Racism, misogyny, cisheterosexism, ableism, classism, anti-Islamic prejudice, and other forms of bigotry were never tolerated. The page’s many administrators have, true to the cooperative anarchist tradition, created a democratic system of accountability to determine how to delete particular oppressive comments, as to prevent needless censorship while simultaneously creating a genuinely non-threatening, non-hierarchical space for readers—a true rarity on the internet today.