Facebook Will Continue Trump Ban For Another 6 Months

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

And yet First Amendment absolutists would make it so, disdaining Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ recognition that there are limitations to the freedom of speech: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

Social media companies have been reckless and irresponsible in allowing internet trolls (and Russian dezinformatsiya bots) to publish false conspiracy theories and disinformation on their platforms that is the functional equivalent of “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

While social media companies all have “terms of use” that purport to deal with this problem, it is only sporadically enforced and they do a terrible job of monitoring their platforms. There are several social media platforms that make no effort at all, allowing for unregulated “free speech” (anything goes) under an absolutist approach to free speech.

I should note that only the government is constrained by the First Amendment. Private companies, including this blog, are free to determine what gets posted on their platforms. This is not censorship, as some of our blog trolls have tried to assert, demonstrating their ignorance – only the government is constrained by the Constitution from censorship.

Donald Trump regularly and repeatedly violated the “terms of use” of his favorite social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Despite his regular and repeated abuses of their “terms of use,” these social media companies gave Donald Trump an exalted status, allowing him to do whatever he wanted without any consequences, or any concern for the effects on our democracy. Facebook and Twitter eventually started adding warning labels to his false and incendiary posts, which likely only encouraged his MAGA/QAnon cult members to navigate to those tweets even more.

It took Donald Trump inciting a violent seditious insurrection against the United States government on January 6 in a failed coup d’etat to overthrow American democracy and to install him as America’s first despotic GQP authoritarian dictator based upon his promotion of the Big Lie that the election was stolen from him to finally get this malignant threat to American democracy banned from social media.

Jack Dorsey at Twitter appropriately banned Donald Trump for the rest of his life. That evil punk Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook has gone soft in his never-ending pursuit of making more profits, the fate of our democracy be damned. Facebook’s Oversight Board Upholds Trump Ban — With A Big Catch:

Facebook’s Oversight Board, an independent panel selected to weigh in on content moderation decisions at the social media platform, announced Wednesday it will uphold Facebook’s Jan. 7 ban on former President Donald Trump.

But the company-appointed board also said it was “not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension,” asking the site to review the decision within six months. The board said Facebook “did not follow a clear, published procedure” in imposing a ban “for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored.”

“Within 6 months of today, Facebook must review this matter and decide a new penalty that reflects its rules, the severity of the violation, and prospect of future harm,” the board said. “Facebook can either impose a time-limited suspension or account deletion.”

Facebook will “consider the board’s decision and determine an action that is clear and proportionate,” responded Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of global affairs and communications.

“In the meantime, Mr. Trump’s accounts remain suspended,” Clegg said in a statement.

Oooh, so little Donny gets a time out in the corner for inciting a violent seditious insurrection against the United States government on January 6 in a failed coup d’etat to overthrow American democracy and to install him as America’s first despotic GQP authoritarian dictator?

Fuck you Facebook. These fascists are coming for you eventually. Delete his accounts now. What more evidence do you need?

In February, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 220 national organizations, urged Facebook’s Oversight Board to permanently suspend Trump’s account and criticized the platform for allowing him to defy its community guidelines.

“Facebook merely labeling the posts was grossly ineffective and did almost nothing to limit the interaction or sharing of the posts by Trump,” the group said.

“The potential of incitement of more violence is a real threat should Trump continue to have the opportunity to spread lies and false information on Facebook. The Oversight Board should recommend suspending the Trump account permanently.”

Donald Trump is still actively promoting the Big Lie that the election was stolen from him. It is now the central organizing principle of the Party of Trump. The Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit” to prove his Big Lie is a circus act to be taken on the road to other states, as Donald Trump has encouraged.

The MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection is ongoing and continuing. 147 Republican lawmakers still objected to the election results even after the Capitol attack. GQP state legislators across the country are trying to rig the next two election cycles with Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws, and will soon engage in extreme gerrymandering in their quest to complete the coup d’etat against American democracy over the next two elections. The threat to our national security continues.

As Thomas Friedman warns, Trump’s Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes Our Democracy:

President Biden’s early success in getting Americans vaccinated, pushing out stimulus checks and generally calming the surface of American life has been a blessing for the country. But it’s also lulled many into thinking that Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, which propelled the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, would surely fade away and everything would return to normal. It hasn’t.

We are not OK. America’s democracy is still in real danger. In fact, we are closer to a political civil war — more than at any other time in our modern history. Today’s seeming political calm is actually resting on a false bottom that we’re at risk of crashing through at any moment.

Because, instead of Trump’s Big Lie fading away, just the opposite is happening — first slowly and now quickly.

Under Trump’s command and control from Mar-a-Largo, and with the complicity of most of his party’s leaders, that Big Lie — that the greatest election in our history, when more Republicans and Democrats voted than ever before, in the midst of a pandemic, must have been rigged because Trump lost — has metastasized. It’s being embraced by a solid majority of elected Republicans and ordinary party members — local, state and national.

“Denying the legitimacy of our last election is becoming a prerequisite for being elected as a Republican in 2022,” observed Gautam Mukunda, host of Nasdaq’s “World Reimagined” podcast and author of the book “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Mattered.”

“This is creating a filter that over time will block out anyone willing to tell the truth about the election.” It will leave us with “a Republican Party where you cannot rise without declaring that the sun sets in the East, a Republican Party where being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement.”

[T]hink about that for a second. To be a leader in today’s G.O.P. you either have to play dumb or be dumb on the central issue facing our Republic: the integrity of our election. You have to accept everything that Trump has said about the election — without a shred of evidence — and ignore everything his own attorney general, F.B.I. director and election security director said — based on the evidence — that there was no substantive fraud.

What kind of deformed party will such a dynamic produce? A party so willing to be marinated in such a baldfaced lie will lie about anything, including who wins the next election and every one after that.

There is simply nothing more dangerous for a two-party democracy than to have one party declare that no election where it loses is legitimate, and, therefore, if it loses it will just lie about the results and change the rules.

Donald Trump and the MAGA/Qanon personality cult of Donald Trump remain a clear and present danger to the Republic.  This country needs to treat these American fascists the same way that post-war Germany has treated neo-Nazis. How Germany Deals With Neo-Nazis (2017):

In Germany, the very presence of neo-Nazis openly marching through a city bearing swastika-emblazoned flags, as in Charlottesville, is unthinkable. Unlike the United States, Germany places strict limits on speech and expression when it comes to right-wing extremism. It is illegal to produce, distribute or display symbols of the Nazi era — swastikas, the Hitler salute, along with many symbols that neo-Nazis have developed as proxies to get around the initial law. Holocaust denial is also illegal.

The law goes further. There is the legal concept of “Volksverhetzung,” the incitement to hatred: Anybody who denigrates an individual or a group based on their ethnicity or religion, or anybody who tries to rouse hatred or promotes violence against such a group or an individual, could face a sentence of up to five years in prison.

These laws apply to individuals, but they and others are also defenses against extremist political parties. The Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest court, can ban parties it deems intent on impairing or destroying the political order. This year the court came close to banning the extremist right-wing National Democratic Party but determined the organization was too weak to outlaw.

This legal regime is backed by a political culture that effectively bans expression that might pass legal muster but still flirts with racist ideologies.

* * *

In recent days, people in my Twitter feed have passed around a passage from the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper’s 1945 book, “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” that in essence says that tolerance toward the intolerant cannot be infinite, or the tolerant risk eradication. That’s Germany’s militant democracy in a nutshell. And there may come a day when the United States must embrace it as well.

While Germany still has a problem with alt-right and neo-Nazi organizations, this does not mean we must allow unfettered access to social media or even broadcast propaganda media (Fox, Newsmax, OANN) for seditious insurrectionists intent on overthrowing the American democratic order and to replace it with GQP authoritarianism under Trumpism, the new America fascism.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact to destroy American democracy.