Being cursed with the politically affluent crowd of conservatism, I have seen a lot of the Facebook pages that align themselves with conservative ideals being censored or banned from Facebook. Facebook has become its own news channel in this day and age. For the most part, people on both sides were able to put forth their viewpoints on the social media platform, and have followers like, comment, and share what they like and don't like. Within the past year, specifically after the election, a lot of those same pages that I have followed have been censored by Facebook, or outright told to get rid of their pages with threats of lawsuits.
This is becoming increasingly more lopsided as I am seeing the liberal/democratic pages I follow garner up more and more followers every year. To put this into perspective, the Occupy Democrats Logic conservative page has a little under half a million followers. Their rival, Occupy Democrats, is the most popular liberal Facebook page, with over six million followers. Just from my experience, I have seen the liberal page make a post that promotes a tremendous amount of hate and racial divide against white people. These pages have yet to be considered violating Facebook's terms and regulations. Now compare that to a conservative page I am very familiar with, one which has been banned three times, forcing them to change their page name twice because of a comment suggesting that Franklin Roosevelt had Japanese put in internment camps solely because of their skin pigmentation. The page stressed that it was a democrat who condoned this behavior. Twenty-four hours later, they received a message from Facebook saying that post violated their terms and agreements. Something that is an actual fact that can be easily confirmed via history textbooks has been deemed offensive when portrayed on social media. Another cut and try example is when the conservative page, Occupy Democrats Logic, now going by the names ODL I, ODL ii, and ODL iii, made a post that said "Kill all black people", something which was very offensive. But this was simply a test, because other liberal pages have been making posts calling for the death of white people and anyone who was a white male. These pages to this day have yet to receive any form of punishment. ODL, almost immediately received a message from Facebook regarding the "Kill all black people" post. It was immediately taken down, but posts about the murder of white people still continue. It has become a sad era for free speech.
Conservative speakers, conservative Facebook pages and conservative writers are being censored in some way by society. It has become clear that social media will soon be the cornerstone of where we get our information regarding life, politics, sports, etc. I can only hope that free speech will not go down with it.
