On Friday, January 23, 2021, Facebook conducted a second purge of leftist accounts. As with the first purge (August 19, 2020), no explanation of any kind was offered to those whose accounts were disabled, and there appear to be no conditions under which Facebook will reinstate the accounts. Some of the individuals whose accounts were disabled are detailed in an article from the World Socialist Website, but we’ve also noted that several of our Missouri comrades who somehow escaped the first purge lost their accounts on Friday.
Facebook hasn’t made any public statement about this latest wave of leftist bans. We’ve had to figure out that something deliberate was happening on our own.
In the meantime, I’ve learned that at least some individuals who were promoting the falsehoods of the Qanon conspiracy theory have been warned by Facebook that they must remove any posts containing misinformation from their accounts or have them disabled. The reason Qanon people are getting a warning and an opportunity to remove the bullshit, while the left is not getting this opportunity is twofold.
First, leftists are not posting bullshit. Our posts are the truth, so there’s nothing to correct.
Second, Facebook — like all of neoliberalism — wants to hide that the left exists at all. By hiding it, they don’t have to address it. If they addressed it, people would figure out that neoliberalism is a scam and that the left represents a general approach to getting out of it (we can certainly disagree on the details of how to do that). The Democratic party wants you to believe that they — a near-right party representing the ruling elite of global capitalism — are the left, so they don’t want the real left around for comparison. Renegade Cut covered this well in this video.
In contrast, Qanon is best defeated by shining a light on it because if you hear about it all at once, it seems silly (it only tricks people who are sucked into it slowly). Qanon is basically what happens when you try to figure out what’s broken about society, but you’ve already predetermined that the answer can’t be capitalism. It is a Rube Goldberg machine meant to solve a problem while simultaneously completely avoiding the correct answer. This is why capitalists waited so long to crack down on Qanon’s misinformation — it didn’t seem like a threat. Rather, it seemed like just another component of the pro-capitalist lies that we’re all swimming in — until it went after Congress and Joe Biden.
Remember, Trump had done several impeachable things before the House of Representatives decided to actually impeach him the first time. Concentration camps, stealing children from their families, banning Muslims from coming into the US, and ejecting trans soldiers from our military were all fine, apparently, because none of those affected the power of capital. The action they would not tolerate was him going after Biden, who had already been chosen as the next President by the donor class.
So, basically, any leftist account that posts true criticism of capital and has a significant number of people following it will be banned by Facebook eventually, effectively extinguishing criticism of capitalism from the platform. Qanon followers are allowed to continue because they do not criticize capital — in fact, their misinformation protects capital from criticism (even if it is disruptive). It’s a smart strategy for Zuckerberg; as long as Facebook maintains its monopoly on American’s eyeballs, this approach will mean political agitation remains well below the level required for material change to occur, and he gets to keep his $100.4 billion.
The power of Facebook to silence political positions that it doesn’t like is extremely dangerous, but these bans are not a violation of the First Amendment. The First Amendment only requires that the US government allow free speech; it has no bearing on the behavior of a corporation. This is by design. Because we’re living under liberalism (a pseudo-democracy in which capitalists are the ruling class and can use their economic power to rule in an authoritarian fashion), and because each corporation is essentially its own little authoritarian state (some pretend to be more or less democratic, but that’s anocracy — fake democracy), they extinguish any anti-capitalist speech within their sphere of influence.
I don’t have a clear idea for how to fix this problem; however, it seems clear that part of the problem is that there is no protection for political positions and political groups. Democracy only really works if minority rights are protected, and there are many different minority groups that do have nominal civil rights protection, but political groups do not have that protection.
Misinformation is certainly a problem, but there’s a difference between “having a political position” and “spreading lies”. We can agree on the facts and still have different ideas about what to do about those facts; that’s a political position. If some people are mostly accepting of reality, while another group is rejecting reality (for whatever reason), that’s a different problem.