Facebook's new policy: "it's okay to threaten people we hate with death"

published Jul 10, 2019, last modified Aug 04, 2020

So which people are these newly-minted kulaks? Anyone Facebook says so.

Edit: Facebook appears to have reversed the worst mistakes of the policy being critiqued here.

Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) has just reported on Summit.news that Facebook's new policy explicitly permits issuing death threats or violent threats to a specific group of people:

I found this almost impossible to believe... but I verified it independently (see below for proof) and it is real.

Facebook now officially condones — explicitly permits that which they do not prohibit — death or violent threats to anyone described as having carried out violent crimes.  Last time I checked, it was still illegal to issue threats to people, whether they have been accused of a crime or not.  Facebook thus condones illegal activity in their platform.

Facebook also condones the same behavior directed at people reported by the media as being criminals or predators.  Never mind it being illegal to threaten convicts — you don't even have to get convicted in order for Facebook to pretend threats against you don't count.  The cynic in me says they snuck in this exception so they could say "death threats against Donald Trump don't count"... never mind the assassination attempt during the campaign.

Finally, Facebook officially designates as okay to threaten and terrorize those individuals who are listed in their "Dangerous Individuals" shit list.  What's the criteria they use to determine who belongs?  They won't say — but here's something we know for sure: their categorization is an insult to meaning itself.

For the sake of argument, let's grant Facebook's malevolent premise that death threats against "dangerous individuals" are acceptable (they are not).  Their idea of "Dangerous Individuals" is completely nuts.  Their list of Dangerous Individuals is absolutely not a list of dangerous people.  It contains intelligent, non-violent, popular people — like Paul Joseph Watson or Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) — whose only distinction is having made political commentary which left-leaning Facebook employees hate.  That is not dangerous under any stretch of the imagination.  The only people guilty of hate are the liars who work for Facebook, not the people which Facebook has effectively declared open season on.

Facebook has formally embraced a policy by which they selectively pretend to be blind to illegal activity committed by their user base.  The only lens through which this outrageous policy change makes any sense, is that Facebook officials want to aid the incitement of violence and terror against (a) people vilified by media, or (b) people they themselves — through an entirely arbitrary process whose details no one knows — have designated as "bad".

Facebook has enormous power over their user base.  In particular, they have the power to convey to their user base that hating certain people is okay.  Facebook had already been wielding this power this through selective enforcement — by arbitrarily suppressing some inoffensive people, while allowing verifiably violent and hateful content against them.  Their new, updated policy is just a formalization of what they had already decided to do as an organization.  And it's evil.

I was one of the first users Facebook registered, after they opened up to non-educational e-mail address owners.  I've never really considered deleting Facebook.  Until today.  I am quite aligned with many of the people Facebook has designated as "Dangerous Individuals"; if I were more of a public persona, I would no doubt land on that same arbitrary shit list.  I just cannot see myself helping build anything on a platform that employs people vile and self-righteous enough to broadcast to the world that death threats against their political enemies are okay.

Slowly we inch... slowly we inch.


For the record — I have personally verified that Paul Joseph Watson is telling the truth.  Here is my own independent screenshot of the same page, in context: