Has Facebook Censorship Gone Too Far?
When the town square is the rectangle of your laptop or smartphone, and the local sheriff is an algorithm trademarked by an unregulated and unabashed Mark Zuckerberg & Co., there’s no doubt trouble ahead for people who “like” free speech.
Facebook is censoring the news. While Facebook, a privately owned company, has every legal right — technically — to choose to publish or not publish anything it wants to, it has a moral obligation as the largest provider of the 21st century public square to not censor. Yet what it chooses to censor and to not censor apparently is subject to some deeply held secretive algorithm, has zero explainable reason, and has the chilling effect of creating an Orwellian state — none of which today’s society, enmeshed in an Arab Spring, an Occupy Wall Street Movement, and an upcoming 2012 U.S. election cycle, can afford.
Two personal examples.
On October 15, I attempted to share a link to a piece I had written about the Occupy Wall Street Movement — on Occupy Wall Street Movement Facebook pages, like Occupy Seattle, Occupy Miami, Occupy San Francisco. The piece, “Occupy Times Square: Over 10,000 Peaceful Protestors, So NYPD Arrests Dozens,” was less than flattering of the New York City Police Department’s treatment of Occupy Wall Street protestors — 10,000 that day had crowded Times Square — dozens of which the NYPD decided to arrest. I was there, camera in hand, reporting, and had raced home to edit my video and photos and to file several reports.
October 15 notice from Facebook
With no warning, and for no discernible reason, after posting a link to the piece on a very few “Occupy” sites (perhaps three?), I received a notice (image, right) from Facebook that claimed I was posting “spam and irrelevant content on Facebook pages.” The notice also came with the note that my account was being disable for fifteen days from posting any content on pages that were not mine.
In other words, Facebook had “decided” that the content I was sharing wasn’t content, that it was “spam,” or “irrelevant,” despite the very clear fact that it was neither.
Facebook offered no opportunity to challenge its decision, no option to protest, no option to appeal. Almost as bad, Facebook did not offer a credible reason as to why it deemed original news information as spam and irrelevant. And quite frankly, censoring a report of questionable police actions is a chilling notion.
But I decided, (and in hind site, not the best decision, and certainly uncharacteristic!) my time was better spent focusing on what I could control, rather than railing against Mark Zuckerberg’s Bloomberg-beholden behemoth, so I waited the fifteen days, which, as an aside, strongly impacted my ability to disseminate news.
(For those interested, this is my Facebook account, and this is the Facebook site for The New Civil Rights Movement. Rarely do I post anything personal to either. Feel free to rifle through them — or to follow/like/subscribe to them. You’ll find neither spam nor “irrelevant” content.)
Traffic at The New Civil Rights Movement suffered, though, fortunately, not immensely, as we essentially begged our 11,000 Facebook fans, my personal 1000+ Facebook friends, and our 23,000 Twitter followers to take up the slack. (Approximately 18%, annually, of traffic to the site comes via Facebook, just behind Google News, and ay in front of traffic from Twitter.) But our ability to touch, directly, those most-interested in the Occupy Wall Street Movement news was impacted greatly. Would traffic — and thus, dissemination of relevant news — have been higher, had Facebook’s draconian censorship not taken place? I have to believe, yes.
That was example number one.
Example number two occurred Sunday.
Facebook Blocked Content Notice from November 6
After editing our “Week In Review” segment, I attempted to share it on Facebook on my personal page. I received an even more draconian censorship notice: “Warning: This message contains blocked content. Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.” My first thought was, “that’s odd,” as this is an original post and was just published a few seconds prior. My second thought was, OK, that’s their problem, and I’ll take the heat if a Facebook user wants to report my site’s content as “abusive.” So I tried to post it again.
The post was not only tagged as “abusive,” but Facebook would not allow me to post it to my own page, anyway!
The title of the article was, ironically, “Week In Review: A Zygote Is A Person?, Eurozone Greek Crisis, NJ Gay Marriage, Internet Freedom.”
What could be considered so “abusive” in a weekly news review? Was it the Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations story? Was it the NJ gay marriage story? Was it the Internet freedom story? Was it the Mississippi personhood bill story?
News, by its very nature, is often uncomfortable. The New Civil Rights Movement works very hard every day to present information respectfully and in an intelligent context. The dozens of journalists, bloggers, other news sites that link regularly to our content don’t see it as “abusive,” so who is some algorithm at Facebook to deem it so — and to take the extraordinary measures of banning its publication?
Facebook, and other social media sites, such as Twitter, and Google +, or Reddit, Digg, and other news dissemination networks, have a moral obligation to not censor content — especially content that is not by any means hate speech. When news is censored by the largest content distribution vehicle on the planet, the world has indeed become a very scary place. Who know what — or who — will be next?
Ironically, last year ago I wrote several stories attempting to get Facebook to shut down sites that actually were abusive. Anti-gay hate speech Facebook groups and Facebook pages — that in any other country would be banned and their authors sent to jail — had been allowed to stay, unaddressed, for months.
We were successful in getting Facebook to shutter groups/pages like, “Kill All Gays,” “I HATE GAYS,” “STOP AIDS!!!!! KILL GAYS AN NIGGERS!!!!!!!!!,” “GAY ? news flash : we fuckin’ hate you !!,” and, “join if you hate homosexuals,” for example.
Can the distinction be made between a journalist posting a link to original content — news about NYPD crackdown on lawful protestors or a basic news story — and a hate group? Using a test many courts of law embrace — the “reasonable person test,” I would have to say, yes. Wouldn’t you?
So, why does Facebook, which boasts more than 800 million active users — almost three times the number of U.S. residents — feel it has not only the right but the obligation to spuriously ban some content that is far from “abusive,” and ban users who are posting original news items, and for weeks?
Facebook’s censoring arm has gone much too far. When the town square is the rectangle of your laptop or smartphone, and the local sheriff is an algorithm trademarked by an unregulated and unabashed Mark Zuckerberg & Co., there’s no doubt trouble ahead for people who “like” free speech.
Editor’s note: Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
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Founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has become what its president, Kevin Roberts, now hails as the “intellectual backbone” of the conservative movement. It crafted the policy blueprint that powered President Ronald Reagan’s right-wing revolution — and today, under Roberts’s leadership, it’s once again shaping the machinery of power. Through its highly controversial Project 2025 — a plan widely credited to Roberts as its chief architect — Heritage laid out a road map for President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda. But Roberts’s recent missteps have rattled the institution, raising strong questions about his leadership — and the future direction of the conservative movement itself.
Roberts gained widespread attention in July 2024 when he issued a warning to Democrats: “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
At the time, Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said, “they are threatening violence.”
As did others.
“Kevin Roberts is threatening violence to anyone not following his dear leader,” former Republican and former U.S. Congressman Denver Riggleman wrote. “Every network should cover this.”
Roberts’s remarks had come just after the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a new constitutional principle of “presidential immunity” for official acts — a decision critics say President Donald Trump has wielded to expand his power.
Late last month, Roberts came under tremendous criticism after throwing his support behind former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who had a two-hour interview with far-right extremist leader Nick Fuentes, whom many see as promoting Christian nationalism, white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.
“There has been speculation that @Heritage is distancing itself from @TuckerCarlson over the past 24 hours,” Roberts wrote on October 30 when posting the video that sparked this current firestorm. “I want to put that to rest right now.”
The editors of the right-wing National Review in a scathing editorial explained the issue: “Tucker Carlson, knee-deep already, has taken another step into the muck with a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes.”
HERITAGE “WILL ALWAYS DEFEND OUR FRIENDS … THAT INCLUDES TUCKER CARLSON”
Roberts had wasted no time in coming to Carlson’s defense.
“The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians. And we won’t start doing that now,” he said in his video supporting Carlson.
Roberts insisted that Heritage “will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”
Criticism of Roberts was immediate.
Journalist Yashar Ali called it a “watershed moment.”
“In his statement,” Ali wrote, “Kevin condemns what he calls a ‘venomous coalition’ that is ‘sowing division’ by attacking Tucker. That ‘venomous coalition,’ includes MAGA Republicans as well as Jewish conservative commentators, activists, and donors.”
“Kevin also frames Nick Fuentes’s rhetoric as worthy of debate, rather than something to be condemned outright. A shift like this would’ve been unthinkable for Heritage just three years ago.”
Condemnations came, and continue to do so — from both outside and inside Heritage.
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski on Thursday reported on what one senior staffer called the “absolute s–” swirling inside Heritage.
“The staff that we talked to told us the Heritage Foundation is in open revolt over the president’s defense of Carlson,” Kaczynski explained.
That senior staffer also told CNN that Roberts had “lost control over the organization.”
Kaczynski noted that they also “said there’s an open rebellion, and this really all came to a head [Wednesday], where they had this all hands meeting … this was kind of going around social media, where Roberts publicly apologized, according to her recording we obtained, Roberts told employees, ‘I made a mistake. I let you down. I let this institution down. I’m sorry.'”
“But,” Kaczynski added, Roberts “also made clear he has no plans to resign.”
On Friday, Reason senior editor Stephanie Slade wrote that at a Thursday night event, “I was asked if the crisis at Heritage Foundation seemed to be blowing over. This morning I received a message from someone inside the building about Kevin Roberts: ‘He needs to be made to resign by the [Heritage] Foundation Board of Trustees.'”
“In speaking to current and former Heritage staffers over the last week,” Slade continued, “the emotion I’ve most commonly encountered is disgust and the words I’ve most commonly heard are ‘Kevin Roberts has to go.'”
By Wednesday, as Ali noted, Roberts had “made his fourth public statement on the Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes situation … over the course of six days.” After the initial video that ignited the firestorm, Roberts made three other attempts to “clean up” his remarks.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman, Heritage senior fellow Amy Swearer, in remarks before Heritage staff, told Roberts, “over the last week, you have shown a stunning lack of both courage and judgment.”
She called Roberts’ initial defense of Carlson “at best … equal parts incoherent, unhelpful and naive.”
“At worst, it was more akin to a master class in cowardice that ran cover for the most unhinged dregs of the far right.”
“LOST MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN DONATIONS”
Heritage also appears to be losing important donors.
“One major donor, whose organization contributes more than a half million dollars annually to Heritage Foundation, told us that they had totally lost faith in Roberts,” Kaczynski reported.
“They said, ‘I see how things play out, but if Kevin remains as president, we will not be giving to Heritage.'”
“Likewise, the Zionist Organization of America, that’s actually the oldest pro-Israel group in the United States, announced that it has withdrawn from Heritage’s initiative on antisemitism, unless Roberts publicly apologized, and retract his praise for Carlson.”
Newsmax reported that “Zionist Organization of America President Morton Klein told Newsmax Friday that Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts should resign immediately.”
“My organization has many of the same donors as Heritage,” Klein also said. “They’ve told me that they’re stopping all funding for Heritage until they get rid of Kevin Roberts, so yes, they have lost millions of dollars in donations since this controversy arose.”
Klein also “pointed to longtime Heritage fellow Stephen Moore’s recent departure.”
“He doesn’t want to be involved with Heritage, which is now tainted as an antisemitic, bigoted organization,” Klein told Newsmax. “It’s harmed everything else they do.”
Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that “Any tent that is big enough for them …is too big for me,” referring to Fuentes and his allies.
The Journal reported that “Goldfeder resigned from Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism in the aftermath of Roberts’s video.”
“CIVIL WAR AT THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION”
Other critics outside Heritage have also been observing Roberts’ crumbling support, and what it means for the future of the organization, its president, and the conservative movement.
“The civil war at the Heritage Foundation is far more consequential than most people realize,” noted Mike Madrid, the prominent Latino Republican political consultant. “The divide seems irreconcilable and it could splinter the American right irreversibly.”
Conservative New York Times opinion columnist David French wrote on Sunday, “I don’t know if Roberts will survive at Heritage.”
“I do know that Carlson and Fuentes and their constellation of friends and allies are far too popular to cancel or even to contain,” he noted, and observed: “The fight for the future of the Republican Party is underway.”
And pointing to a Washington Post article on the crisis at Heritage, Madrid declared: “The whole thing is imploding.”
“Absolute shitshow.”
An exclusive KFILE investigation reveals the fierce backlash within the GOP against Tucker Carlson for his interview with controversial white nationalist and holocaust denier Nick Fuentes as The Heritage Foundation, which helped create project 2025, goes… pic.twitter.com/MPkdSMP57u
— Erin Burnett OutFront (@OutFrontCNN) November 7, 2025
Image via Shutterstock
President Donald Trump renewed his demand that Republican senators eliminate the 60-vote filibuster, which he sees as one of the biggest roadblocks to achieving his far-reaching agenda. Now, he said he wants to eliminate the filibuster as a way to ensure permanent Republican control of the government.
The president has been calling for senators to act, despite Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s strong opposition to invoking the “nuclear option.”
In a lengthy Truth Social post last week, Trump expressed his agenda.
“It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” he declared.
READ MORE: Trump Admin Starts Setting Stage for Recession — and Shifting the Blame
He warned that Democrats want to “substantially expand (PACK!) the United States Supreme Court, make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico States (Thereby automatically picking up 4 Senate seats, many House seats, and at least 8 Electoral Votes!), and many other highly destructive things.”
“Well, now WE are in power, and if we did what we should be doing, it would IMMEDIATELY end this ridiculous, Country destroying ‘SHUT DOWN.'”
Trump then admitted: “I want to do it in order to take advantage of the Democrats….”
Trump has repeated his call to end the filibuster several times since then, most recently on Friday afternoon.
“The Democrats will do this,” he said of killing the filibuster, “so if the Democrats are gonna do it, I’m saying Republicans should do it before they get a chance.”
“It’s very simple,” Trump explained.
READ MORE: Democratic Rep. Interrupts Speaker Johnson — Accuses Him of ‘Lies’
“And if we do it, we will never lose the midterms, and we will never lose the general election, because we will have produced so many different things for our people — for the people, for the country — that it would be impossible to lose an election.”
Critics quickly weighed in with warnings.
“I thought the vice president Vance statement about ignoring judges would be it for today,” wrote The Steady State, a group of over 350 former national security and intelligence officials, referring to JD Vance’s apparent suggestion to ignore a federal judge’s order to release about $6 billion in SNAP funds.
“President Trump went a little farther in terms of crossing yet another red line,” the group continued, “explaining why he wants [the] filibuster gone he is very clear. One party rule. Elections that he and his never lose —— that is autocracy.”
Trump on ending the filibuster: “If we do it, we will never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election … it would be impossible to lose an election.” pic.twitter.com/oLOaOg53nV
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 7, 2025
READ MORE: ‘Make Lots of Trump Babies’: Dr. Oz Highlights Midterm Goals
Image via Reuters
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sought Friday to cast a positive light on the Federal Aviation Administration’s order requiring airlines to cut ten percent of flights at 40 major airports — a move prompted by overworked air traffic controllers who have gone weeks without pay as the government shutdown stretches into its 38th day with no immediate end in sight.
More than 800 flights nationwide were canceled on Friday, leaving some travelers “scrambling to figure out backup plans,” the Associated Press reported.
But According to Secretary Duffy, he has come up with a “unique action” that reduces a major frustration of air travel: flight delays.
READ MORE: Trump Admin Starts Setting Stage for Recession — and Shifting the Blame
“I asked the head of the air traffic controller union to reach out to his controllers, to ask them to show up. It is their jobs,” Duffy said on Friday.
“If they start coming to work, we may have the same experience we had in Newark: We had delays and cancellations in Newark in the early summer. We reduced the capacity, and then the flights were on time. Right?”
“It was the most on-time months we had in Newark ever,” he added. “So that could be an outcome of what we’re doing, and we’ll see probably more people on less flights, which means less pressure on controllers.”
READ MORE: ‘Make Lots of Trump Babies’: Dr. Oz Highlights Midterm Goals
Secretary Duffy also said, “There’s a very easy solution to the problem that they put directly on my lap, which is open the damn government. Vote to open the government, so those who snipe at me for having to take really unique action — they put that on my plate.”
Critics blasted Duffy.
Republican former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger wrote: “Cutting flights because of the govt shutdown is a stunt, plain and simple.”
He also remarked, “We’re cutting flights and food because of the govt shutdown but ICE is out [in] full force!”
If you just cancel flights, then they’re actually not late! Brilliant stuff from Sean Duffy here pic.twitter.com/s5Euw4hG7R
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 7, 2025
READ MORE: Democratic Rep. Interrupts Speaker Johnson — Accuses Him of ‘Lies’
‘The Whole Thing Is Imploding’: Chaos and Rebellion at America’s Top Right-Wing Think Tank
‘Impossible to Lose’: Trump Pitches Strategy to Cement One-Party Rule
‘Unique Action’: Trump Admin Spins Flight Cancellations as Fix for Traveling Frustration
Trump Admin Starts Setting Stage for Recession — and Shifting the Blame
Judge Rebukes Trump Admin for Defying SNAP Payment Deadline
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