Boggart Abroad: 01/07/23

Saturday, January 07, 2023

Facebook Blocking Magazine Cover Making Fun Of Joe Biden, Triggers Free Speech Row

Joe Biden and Spectator (Australia) cover mocking Biden's confusion, (SourceThe Sun )

As if intent on giving the finger to critics who have attacked its political bias and blatant interference in political matters, and to show that rebranding as META was nothing but a cynical PR exercise, Social Media giant FACEBOOK has once again upset Free Speech advocated by blocking an advert satirising Joe Biden in a depiction of a magazine cover.

Facebook bosses told editorial staff at The Spectator magazine that a cartoon image of the US President on the cover of this week's edition (below) was banned 'for beaching community rules.'

*The Spectator featured the headline Six More Years but showed Mr Biden holding up only five fingers*

The front cover featured the headline Six More Years but showed Mr Biden holding up only five fingers referencing the week's main article commenting on the unavoidably obvious evidence of the US Presidents mental decline..

Editor Fraser Nelson revealed he asked the Facebook to reconsider but the plea was rejected.

In response to the ban Nelson commented: “It seems satire directed at Biden is rejected by Facebook (or its bots) but when we mocked Trump, Boris, Truss that was all fine.” CUK Conservative MP David Jones hit out at Facebook's dictatorial action last night, saying: “Facebook really should understand that freedom of speech sometimes involves making fun of politicians.

“Nobody is beyond that and they shouldn’t be so precious.”

A typically humourless and robotic spokesperson for Facebook said last night: "Anyone who wants to run an ad that's political has to be authorised. If The Spectator resubmit this ad from an authorised person Page admin the ad will be approved." Which is almost as incoherent as the average Joe Biden sentence. Or to put it another way Facebook are saying, "You little people, the riff raff, the rabble, the proles, and anyone Mr. Zuckerberg does not like are not allowed to say or write anything Mark Zuckerberg's minions think The Master might not approve of.

Once again we have proof that the billionaire psychopaths who run corporations that, with the help and complicity of governments and supra - national bureaucracies have come to dominate the internet, behave as if they are above national law, natural law and the law of common decency, and though unelected (and unelectable to anything,) are determined to use the influence their internet near - monopolies to force on the public political agendas that serve only a small, wealthy and influential elite.

It seems our world is moving towards an era of deference and credulousness, the kind of society we left behind over 200 years ago when to criticise te Church or The King might easily result in a painpul and humiliating death and woulf certainly do one's social standing and career prospects no good at all. In modern times we have enthusiatically made use of our freedoms and civil rights to ridicule and satirise our leaders and although the questioning of authority and those who try to control opinion and suppress dissent has been reduced to a cottage industry, the tradition still lives on in online environments though it is now hardly seen or heard in the pervading authoritarian babble of mainstream media heard.

Why has the centre of politics collapsed in this way? I have a little anecdote. In the 1960s when I was a student studying economics and sociology, we were discussing the inter-war period and the rise of Hitler and Nazism in our History class. One day the lecturer, with a wry smile on his face, said “Hitler was a Liberal”. The whole class, who mostly identified as “liberal” or even “socialist”, howled with laughter at what they thought must be a joke. When peace returned, the teacher explained the close correlation between Liberalism and movements of the Far Right which had attracted among others, rational, well-educated Germans.

In short, Fascism and Nazism were in some ways similar to the kind of “Liberal Extremism” we are now encountering on social media and in the 'woke' cluture that has taken over our universities; it is the conviction that there is only one 'right' way of thinking and to utter any though or idea that does not conform to this is an offence of some kind, (hate crime is the currently fashionable term for examples of for non compliance. The decline of the Western liberal democracies and the type of degenerate crisis-politics we are seeing now is another example of this phenomenon.

It is way beyond time that action was taken to break up the social media giants and deny the billionaire psychopaths the pernicious influence whatever deals they have made with corrupt politicians may have bought them.