Then quickly backtracks once saner minds had the chance to review the updated policy:
An update to the Facebook Community Standards which appeared to sanction calls to violence against “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” identified by Facebook was quickly deleted amid public backlash.
On July 9th, Facebook changed its policy regarding “violence and incitement,” amending the policy to allow for “Calls for high-severity violence” against targets which have been identified as dangerous by Facebook itself:
“Do not post:
Threats that could lead to death (and other forms of high-severity violence) of any target(s), where threat is defined as any of the following:
– Statements of intent to commit high-severity violence
– Calls for high-severity violence (unless the target is an organisation or individual covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organisations Policy)
– Including content where no target is specified but a symbol represents the target and/or includes a visual of an armament to represent violence
– Statements advocating for high-severity violence (unless the target is an organisation or individual covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organisations Policy)
– Aspirational or conditional statements to commit high-severity violence (unless the target is an organisation or individual covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organisations Policy”The “dangerous individuals and organizations” policy concerns “terrorist activity,” “organized hate,” “mass or serial murder,” “human trafficking,” and “organized violence or criminal activity.” Under this updated policy, calls to violence could be incited against individuals such as Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopolous, all of which were banned from Facebook for violating the policy.
I don’t think there is much question that the SJWs who run converged sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia would love to be able to publicly endorse death threats against the individuals they deplatform, but it appears that the lawyers have prevailed. For now.
It’s interesting to see how they are showing their hand so clearly, though. This is all part of the developing weaponization of information that we’ve seen in attacks like the termination of the Alt-Hero:Q campaign that was seeded by NPR and Bleeding Cool and the deplatforming of the Rebel’s Run movie by WeFunder that was seeded by The New Republic and Wikipedia.
It’s only a matter of time before those media seedings, which are actually the informational equivalent of artillery spotting, lead to high-severity violence and fatalities on both sides. There will be war.