Last week a Facebook user was blocked from using his page for 30 days after posting an encouragement to enrol to vote in the upcoming postal vote on his Facebook page. He wasn’t told anything about the reason for his ban, other than that it breached the Facebook Community Standards.
The unsuspecting victim of political correctness was not able to challenge the decision because his account had been deactivated.
Daily Telegraph journalist Caroline Marcus contacted Facebook on his behalf for a response, and told columnist Andrew Bolt that a spokesman for Facebook replied to her concern with a glib, “How lovely.”
Marcus discussed the implications this had for the freedom of speech.
“I still can’t work out how this man’s post was in breach of [the Facebook Community Standards]… I would have thought this is an important conversation and that we shouldn’t be encouraging respectful debate about it.”
Marcus herself had her own experience of bullying from same-sex marriage activists earlier in the same week. She had penned a column saying that the intolerance shown by same-sex marriage activists was doing a disservice to the cause, and were turning people off. Marcus explained:
“I thought I’d written a really respectful piece arguing why I think that some aspects of the same-sex marriage campaign are actually doing a disservice to the cause, that they’re self-sabotaging and it’s turning people off because people don’t like being told they can’t think for themselves, that they’re going to be a bigot if they have any concerns about same-sex marriage and issues like protections for freedom of speech and issues like protections for religious freedoms and these sort of instances like what happened with Facebook, which is a partner of the “marriage equality” cause, directly responds to that.
“Now people criticise former Prime Minister Tony Abbott for saying this is an issue for political correctness and freedom of speech but this is part of their campaign; they have also made it about that, so I think they need to have a look at how they’re campaigning on this issue.”
After speaking about the threats and harassment levelled against anyone who might express their views on marriage, Marcus said: “You can’t give in to these people.”