Feb. 26, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
10:31
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Today, Facebook and Instagram deleted Tommy Robinson's accounts. | |
| On his Facebook profile he had over a million subscribers or followers, and on his Instagram one I think he had a few hundred thousand. | |
| So this is a massive social media reach that they have just snuffed out in the same day. | |
| Facebook put out this blog post to explain why. | |
| One of the biggest questions we face is around what we allow on Facebook and we spend a lot of time trying to get this right. | |
| This is hard and critically important. | |
| We want Facebook to be a place where you can express yourself freely and share openly with friends and family. | |
| At the same time, when people come to Facebook, we always want them to feel welcome and safe. | |
| This is something we take incredibly seriously. | |
| So when ideas and opinions cross the line and amount to hate speech that may create an environment of intimidation and exclusion for certain groups in society, in some cases with potentially dangerous offline implications, we take action. | |
| Our public community standards state that this sort of speech is not acceptable on Facebook, and when we become aware of it, we remove it as quickly as we can. | |
| Our rules also make clear that individuals and organisations that are engaged in organised hate are not allowed on the platform and that praise or support for these figures and groups is also banned. | |
| This is true regardless of the ideology they espouse. | |
| Tommy Robinson's Facebook page has repeatedly broken these standards, posting material that uses dehumanizing language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims. | |
| He has also behaved in ways that violate our policies around organized hate. | |
| As a result, in accordance with our policies, we have removed Tommy Robinson's official Facebook page and Instagram profile. | |
| This is not a decision we take lightly, but individuals and organisations that attack others on the basis of who they are have no place on Facebook or Instagram. | |
| Well, they provided no evidence, but why would we expect them to do so? | |
| I followed Tommy on these platforms, and I never saw him using what I would consider to be dehumanizing language and calls for violence that targeted Muslims. | |
| And I would have thought that had he actually done such a thing, on the very same day, it would have been an international media firestorm. | |
| Anyone using any kind of social media knows that calling for the violent beheading of any group of people is probably going to get you kicked off. | |
| But that's exactly what the BBC are claiming he did. | |
| In an article published eight hours ago, Facebook bans Tommy Robinson's page, they say, According to Facebook, a written warning had been sent to Robinson last month about a number of posts on his page that have violated its community standards, including a post calling Muslims filthy scumbags, a post urging people to terrorise and behead those who follow the Quran, a post urging people to make war on Muslims, and multiple videos depicting individuals being bullied. | |
| Well, maybe someone can send me a link to these posts or archives of these posts or at least screenshots of these posts after this video goes up, because I never saw him calling for anyone to behead those who follow the Quran. | |
| I mean, you know, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I must have just not been paying close enough attention. | |
| But I'm sorry, I just didn't see that. | |
| But if these things were posted last month, Tommy has millions of followers, including people like Hope Not Hate, a radical left-wing activist organization that is specifically dedicated and funded to attack what they perceive to be far-right commentators and activists on the internet. | |
| Whether these people are far right or not, well, do you trust a communist to identify a Nazi? | |
| That's the question. | |
| And that's not just a flippant comment either. | |
| There are members of Hope Not Hate who are members of the Communist Party of Britain. | |
| These extremists are given a massively disproportionate amount of political influence in this country. | |
| And I have to say, I find the timing of this very suspicious, given how Tommy was getting involved with a documentary crew from the BBC called Panorama that do long-form journalistic content and wanted to do one on him. | |
| He seems to have scooped them by recording the interactions that he had with them and some private conversations that they had had. | |
| And it turns out that Panorama, the BBC documentary crew, British Broadcasting Corporation, a publicly owned corporation that has a commitment to impartiality, is working with far-left activists and members of the Communist Party of Britain. | |
| This is an absolute disgrace whether you care about Tommy Robinson or not. | |
| You may think Tommy Robinson is exactly as vile as Hope Not Hate portray him to be, but I'm afraid that that fades into total irrelevancy when you think about the importance of the BBC maintaining their neutrality when conducting their journalism. | |
| I mean, if they are going to work with openly activist communist organisations like Hope Not Hate, then they certainly cannot claim to be impartial and they are violating their own charter. | |
| And it's not like Hope Not Hate have some sort of pristine history of not being complete scumbags and trying to infiltrate organisations and groom members of other people's teams in order to try and get them to say something compromising with which they can frame them. | |
| I mean they were at our UKIP Bolton meeting, but the problem for them is that we were the ones rejecting the BNP. | |
| They expected that we would be embracing it and had to go away empty-handed. | |
| At the same time, ex-Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam was also suspended from Facebook because he was apparently an administrator on Tommy Robinson's team. | |
| It required an intervention by Donald Trump Jr. to get them to unban him, to which he says, Facebook is telling reporters I was accidentally banned because I was an admin on a page which spread hate. | |
| Well, that's not true, obviously. | |
| And if I was, then why unban me? | |
| They're knocking people off for being thought criminals. | |
| And he's right. | |
| I find it very difficult to believe that the wave of censorship currently hitting Tommy Robinson is unconnected from his expose against the BBC. | |
| And I think that the glue that holds all of this together are activist groups like Hope Not Hate, basically instructing the BBC on who to target and what to say and how they can best hurt them. | |
| It appears that someone has also taken credit for getting Tommy Robinson banned from Facebook and Instagram as well. | |
| Mohamed Shafiq tweeted, next meeting to be arranged very shortly is with YouTube and Google here in the UK to ensure that Tommy Robinson is banned from their platforms. | |
| Watch this space. | |
| Who is Mohammad Shafiq? | |
| Well, he works for the BBC. | |
| He bills himself in his Twitter bio as a Muslim broadcaster on TV, radio, columnist, chief executive of the Ramadan Foundation and paper reviewer Saturday's BBC5 Live and a regular contributor to Russia Today. | |
| Naturally, do not contact him and try to insult him or threaten him or anything of the sort. | |
| Just be aware that this guy is taking credit for this. | |
| And again, I have to say, BBC, how is that impartial? | |
| How is that in any way impartial? | |
| I thought your journalists and your presenters were the public face of the BBC, and this is what they do. | |
| That's unacceptable. | |
| That's absolutely unacceptable. | |
| And I will obviously be cancelling my TV license. | |
| Because I never use it anyway. | |
| Majid Nawaz actually put it best when he said, I see pro-Pakistan blasphemy law activist Mohammad Shafiq is claiming credit for Tommy Robinson being banned from Facebook. | |
| This is akin to People's Momentum, which is Jeremy Corbyn's radical communist activist group, getting the new UKIP banned. | |
| Tech companies, you're being used by those who, by their own definition, should also be banned. | |
| That's an excellent point by Majid. | |
| And I'd like to address a second point that he makes and respectfully disagree with it. | |
| He says, this is not a free speech issue. | |
| Tech companies are private enterprises after all. | |
| It can be a discrimination and service provision issue if tech companies are inconsistent in the application of their policies. | |
| Here, the digital cultural blind spot appears to be at work again. | |
| I don't think that's correct. | |
| I think that's a bit too libertarian for me. | |
| I think this is a free speech issue. | |
| And I think it's a free speech issue in the same way that securing your right to free speech and your ability to speak freely on public methods of communication, which is what social media platforms are, even if they're privately owned, I think is akin much more to securing your right to a fair trial and legal representation. | |
| I mean, there's a reason that the state pays for your lawyers if you can't afford your own, and that is to make sure you do have the ability to secure your right to fair representation and fair access to the law. | |
| And I really think that free speech on the internet using social media should be looked at through this lens because this is about free speech. | |
| Tommy has been censored. | |
| He has lost the ability to speak to millions of people who wanted to hear from him. | |
| And now he is reduced to just his YouTube channel, which has already been demonetized. | |
| And honestly, I can't say I recall him ever calling for the beheading of people who follow the Quran and all of this sort of thing. | |
| I mean, if he did, I'm willing to be proven wrong, obviously. | |
| I'm just not aware of it. | |
| And nobody's providing any evidence. | |
| So to me, this very much looks like censorship. | |
| It very much looks like a far-left campaign in coordination with the BBC because he managed to make them look bad. | |
| Because ultimately, they do look bad. | |
| They look really bad. | |
| I do think that some of the political heavyweights in Britain who are concerned about the integrity of our institutions should sign a complaint to the BBC Trust or the BBC Board, whichever one it is nowadays. | |
| I know it's changed. | |
| With the complaint that the BBC's journalistic endeavour Panorama was collaborating with a radical left-wing organisation, which is clearly a violation of their commitment to impartiality. | |
| And before I finish, I just want to talk to you about a new Gab extension called Dissenter that has been released again today, which is basically the comment section of the internet. | |
| And I think it's a really great idea. | |
| So as you can see, it's a browser extension that apparently has news headlines running along the top, which is great. | |
| And I haven't taken the time to explore it, but it's got, you know, various other things that are parts of its functionality. | |
| But most importantly for me is the ability to comment on any article, regardless of whether the article has a comment section or not. | |
| So if I type Free Tommy and publish that, you can see that mine comes up with all of the other comments that have been placed on the article. | |
| And I'm quite surprised how many comments and many articles I'm seeing that have these comments on. | |
| Because this thing only went live today. | |
| And I really think you should get it. | |
| I think it's a really great idea. |
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