The Post Disappears: Musings on Facebook Censorship

I have recently noticed something very interesting going on on my Facebook news feed. Specifically, I have noticed that the right wing dogmatic site, Praeger University, a misnomer if there ever was one, and the left wing Monthly Review, which I "friended", have been disappearing from my news feed like Stalinist era commissars disappeared from photos during that era in the USSR. I see both briefly and then both disappear into the aether that is Facebook.

I can only assume that this is happening because Facebook and its algorithms think that if you subtract the "extreme" right and the "extreme" left you end up with Arthur Schlesinger's vital centre and that is where, or so they believe, empirical truth lies. The problem with this assumption is that it is pure rubbish.

It is true that much of what comes out of the mouths of right wing babes is poppycock. The Prager University case is exemplary. Like so many on the right Prager U offers dogmatic truths without excavating and debating those truths as happens in academia when academia is at its best. In academia, for example, if I want to argue that Mormons were primarily the product of cultural factors rather than economic, political, geographic, or demographic, I first have to explore and then critique these other approaches to Mormonism. At Prager U, on the other hand, one only finds ahistorical statements that are akin to statements of faith. There is no exploration of other valid points of view there. There is just dogma, subpar dogma at that.

The moderate centre that Facebook seems to cherish is no more empirically accurate than the right. Like the right the vital centre tends to fetishise and, in turn, use these fetishisations to rationalise and make moral might makes right things like the Americna business takeover of Hawaii, the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American support for South Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, and US support for the overthrow of Salvador Allende.

Where truth generally can be found is in the analyses of the left. Truth can be found in Marxist theory, in Conflict theory, and in social constructionist theory. This is something those "moderate" "centrists" at Facebook simply don't understand. But then they, like those on the right, have drank the ideological kool aid, the opiate of the we are so right because I believe classes.