A social media friend of mine posted a statement on his profile page:
There is not one verse in the entire Bible that says women should cover their bodies well to keep men from lusting after them.
This, of course, drew several responses from the fundamentalist audience, some bringing up verses about modesty and seeming to believe that refuted his statement.
However, contrary to usage in some circles where “modesty” is assumed to mean something about guarding sexual purity, the Biblical word translated as “modesty” comes from a Greek word that could translate as “orderly” or “neat” and in context of putting too much focus on outward appearance.
So, I wrote a response, with a link to a popular online Biblical concordance, rewrote it once to dial back the snark, hit send and…
Huh???
Red box?!?
Error!??
That’s strange…
It would not let me post.
Is there something wrong with Facebook?
Or maybe the post was taken down by my friend?
Perplexed, I decided to send a private message to the friend and ask about the post. I also included the text of my message, with the link, and…
More red!?!
What on earth?!?
It was then that I realized that something in my post had offended the censorship algorithms of the social media platform and the link was my first guess. So, I did what anyone would do, I put the link through tinyurl.com to circumvent the control freaks and, yippie, this time it posted!
But this success was short lived as the site informed me, immediately thereafter, that it had removed my post for “violation of community standards” without explanation.
Why a reference, like BibleHub, would be banned is beyond me. I mean, is the dictionary next? Are we going to ban Webster’s because their rewritten definitions still aren’t woke enough for the totalitarian leftists in Silicon Valley? And the extent of this effort, on the part of the platform, in going a layer deeper by banning even a link to the link, is chilling to say the least and especially when there is no hearing, no way to question the decision, no recourse.
My inquiry online led to a Newsweek article, dated January 28th, claiming that this Bible reference ban was a mistake. The story included this quote from Facebook on the matter: “We’ve since corrected this and BibleHub.com content can now be shared. We apologize for this error.” And yet, months later, my posting a link to that site was blocked even in private messaging and removed when I tried to bypass their system. Apparently nobody fact-checked that claim?
The truly insane part is how these platforms attempt to disguise their censorship under error messages and suggestions that the user may have removed the post knowing full well that this is a lie. They blatantly mislead, brazenly deceive, call election tampering a “total mistake” and then think that we should trust them to be gatekeepers of truth? It is an abomination! An insult to our intelligence.
Meanwhile, a baker in Colorado is sued, once again, by malevolent and meanspirited people because he declined to do a creative work in celebration of a practice that he finds personally offensive or simply doesn’t want to associate himself with. Imagine that. Imagine if Pro-Life activists would deliberately target Democrat-run businesses, who are are known to be pro-abortion and demand they produce things proclaiming abortion to be murder. Would that go over well?
But, I digress, the frustrating part about the Big Tech tyranny was that I was actually making a point against holding women responsible for male lusts. And, even if it were something offensive, it really is none of Mark Zuckerberg’s business what we talk about. The government protects social media corporations, like Facebook, from being held accountable for things that are said on their sites, under section 230, by classifying them as a platform rather than a publisher.
It is long past time for some protection against abuse and discrimination for social media users. Legal speech, especially political and religious speech, should be protected from censorship. Frankly, I don’t care that these are private businesses, there’s a vast difference between a mom and pop cake shop and a cabal of corporate billionaires, the monopolistic Robber Baron’s of our day, trying to manipulate the system, shut down competition and stifle the national conversation.
Fake news and hate speech are only a pretext. The New York Post got taken down for posting the truth about Joe Biden’s son making millions off of Chinese connections and yet never stopped anyone from posting the “very fine people” myth. The real aim is not protection of truth, the aim is complete ideological conformity, to remove any narrative that goes against that of these oligarchs, their minions or the political establishment. The scariest part is that they can shadow ban, throttle content, and otherwise distort the natural flow of information and no one would know any better.
This will not get better any time soon, not when it benefits the regime in power, so it is best to migrate to other platforms now before you get banned and lose all of your connections. These “alt tech” sites are also vulnerable to attack and might not be around long, yet they do still exist. Check out Parler, MeWe, and Gab if free speech is important to you.
But, more than that, speak out against censorship. Yesterday it was conservative firebrands, today it is Bible concordances, tomorrow it could be you. It is time to defend the defenseless.
The clock is ticking. They’re just getting started. Are you ready for social credit scores, with criteria decided by people who hate you? Do you want to be banned from travel for because credit card companies, airlines, and social media platforms conspire, have a policy against religious proselytizing or declare all organisations not far-left to be dangerous extremists?
How long will you wait to say something, to do something?
Irregular Ideation 