Humanevents.com Editor-In-Chief Raheem Kassam discussed being banned from Facebook during a Monday evening edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“You know, I begin to wonder if Facebook have ever been on Facebook,” Kassam began when asked if Facebook’s decision to ban him was a political one. “If they think that calling someone dumb is something outrageous on their platform. I mean, have they ever seen what level of political discourse takes place on their own platform? I’m beginning to wonder if there is actually not an algorithm that is looking at this stuff anymore, but some little nerd in Facebook HQ who is just constantly refreshing my page, looking for excuses to ban me.”(RELATED: Facebook Bans ‘Praise, Support And Representation Of White Nationalism’)
“Last time, they did it right before I gave a speech on the main stage of CPAC,” he continued. “This time two days before we relaunched humanevents.com, and that locks me out of being able to reach the 800,000 people that Human Events has historically put together on its Facebook platform.”
Kassam then argued that Facebook is not just interfering in American politics and news, but also taking steps to remove accounts held by people running for Parliament in the United Kingdom. The editor decried his fellow journalists for failing to condemn social media companies for violating the Second Amendment.
“Firstly, the journalists in question at the White House Correspondents Dinner, they will back the First Amendment extensively, but where is their backing for the Second Amendment? They seem to want to pick and choose, and they also want to pick and choose the issues,” he said.
“And I really do believe — I know people like Donald Trump Jr. are doing excellent work to raise awareness for this, but I really do believe and I hope that it is time this president actually took some executive action to make sure this isn’t happening. What they’re doing is tantamount to that thing that they complain about all the time. Collusion,” he said about social media companies.
Facebook and Google executives appeared before a congressional hearing in April in which they were asked to describe how their algorithms define hate speech and legitimate conservative content.
“Hate speech removals can be particularly complex compared to other types of content,” Counsel for Free Expression and Human Rights at Google Alexandria Walden said at the time. “Hate speech, because it often relies on spoken rather than visual cues, is sometimes harder to detect that some forms of branded terrorist propaganda. It’s intensely content specific.”