http://www.infowars.com/facebook-commissar-warns-infowars-reporter-about-political-posts/
If this is true, wow, that’s wierd.
"reporter Darrin McBreen was instructed by the “Facebook Team” to not voice his political opinion on the popular social networking site.
“Be careful making about making political statements on facebook,” McBreen was told in an email, “facebook is about building relationships not a platform for your political viewpoint. Don’t antagonize your base. Be careful and congnizat (sic) of what you are preaching.”
Facebook sent the message in relation to a comments posted about “Is living off the Grid now a crime?,” an article about “nuisance abatement teams” intimidating people who have decided to disconnect from the power grid in California.
The message provides further evidence that Facebook is not only monitoring discussions, but also feels compelled to warn users about the supposed inappropriateness of their political viewpoints, especially if they deviate from prepackaged left-vs-right political viewpoints propagated by the establishment."
Not that I’m a pro-government jingoist, but this sounds suspect to me.
a) I’d like to see a screen shot of this email.
b) This does not prove that Facebook is monitoring discussions and messages. All this proves (assuming the facts presented are true) is that someone got a message from someone with a facebook email address. For all we know people who saw the infowars post got offended or agitated and flagged the post as violating fb terms of service…and some fb leftist decided to take it upon himself to “set the guy straight”. Or hell…maybe Darrin McBreen is friends with a facebook employee and doesn’t even know it. Or maybe he doesn’t even need to be..I didn’t bother to look, but I wouldn’t be surprised if McBreen has a public account…or at least a public wall.
Again, I’m not saying the story, the way it’s presented by infowars, is out of the realm of possiblity. I’m just saying they (as usual) have taken something that is suspicious and simply combined it with their worldview and then have drawn conclusions that are not completely assured…“assuming a fact not in evidence” as they say. And Alex Jones does this all the time. It pisses me off because it really hurts his credibility…and if there’s one thing a guy in his position needs, it’s a reputation of being honest. And it’s worse because it’s precisely what he accuses “the enemy” of doing…taking something with a kernel of truth to it and then building a whole storyline around it…because as long as something has a grain of truth to it, it’s much harder to debunk or dismiss.
And this is exactly what he does…he takes something with some truth to it, and either balloons it into a conclusion that isn’t fully supported by the evidence, or even worse, a lot of times he’ll say things that kind of sound true, but are only a sideways version of the truth, or an embellishment. Like when the birth certificate fiasco was going on, he said that everyone was told the “short form” was the only certificate that existed, and that “you were a conspiracy theorist if you said something else existed.” I don’t remember anyone ever saying that. The “birthers” were people who claimed he wasn’t born in the U.S. and I don’t remember there ever being a claim that there was no long form certificate and that if you said there was you were a CT.
Now maybe that was the case and I just never heard it, but even still. That’s an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about and it was just the first one I thought of.
For a description of the reality of the birth certificate hoopla, see this post.
Facebook is a private company, they can set their own terms of use. If facebook is sending warnings to its users, so what? That said, I strongly suspect that facebook, Google, (subsidiary) YouTube and other major websites have intelligence connections. Even the publicly available information on facebook is a gold mine for US gov’t data-mining operations. A discreet backdoor would make it that much better.